Her neighbors are, it seems, and I have met quite as cultivated people from beyond the Rocky Mountains as I have even seen in Boston." This was a great admission for Mrs.Van Buren, who verily believed there was nothing worth her consideration out of Boston unless it were a few families in the immediate vicinity of Fifth Avenue and Madison Square.
She was bent upon making Richard uncomfortable, and could at the moment think of no better way of doing it than contrasting his mother's "way" with those of her neighbors.

Occasionally Aunt Barbara put her feeble oar into the surging tide, hoping to check, even if she could not subdue the angry waters; but she might as well have kept silent save that Richard understood and appreciated her efforts to spare him as much as possible.

Mrs.Van Buren was not to be stopped, and at last, when she had pretty fully set before Richard his own and his mother's delinquencies, she turned fiercely on her sister, demanding if she had not said "so and so" with regard to Ethie's home in the West.

Thus straitened, Aunt Barbara replied: "Things did strike me a little odd at Ethie's, and I don't well see how she could be very happy there.

Mrs.Markham is queer--the queerest woman, if I must say it, that I ever saw, though I guess there's a good many like her up in Vermont, where she was raised, and if the truth was known, right here in Chicopee, too; and I wouldn't wonder if there were some queer ones in Boston.