Father wouldn't give a tallow candle for anything that isn't real." A log broke in the centre, and fell, scattering a shower of golden embers over the hearth.

Rising quickly, with one of her sprightly movements, Mrs.Fowler reached for a pair of small brass tongs and pushed the broken log back on the andirons.

Then she threw some fresh wood on the flames, and resumed her seat with an animated gesture as if the incident had enlivened her.
"Now they are talking about the everlasting Pletheridges," whispered Patty.

"I never understand how mother can take so much interest in those people just because they are rich." But to Gabriella it was more inconceivable still that her mother-in-law, with the bluest blood of Virginia in her veins, should regard with such artless reverence the social activities of the granddaughter of a tavern-keeper.

In her native State an impoverished branch of Mrs.
Fowler's family still lived on land which, tradition said, had been granted one of her ancestors by Charles the Second in recognition of distinguished services to that dubious monarch; yet she could long enviously for a closer acquaintance with the plutocratic descendant of an Irish tavern-keeper--an honest man, doubtless, who had laid the foundations of his fortune in a string of halfway houses stretching from New York to Chicago.
"Yes, I dined with Mrs.Pletheridge once," she was saying in the tone in which her royalist ancestor might have acknowledged a command from his King.
"It always makes me angry, I can't help it," pursued Patty.