Does your nose hurt ?" "Not in the least," said her brother, reddening and changing the subject.

"I say, it looks as though it were going to stop raining." He went to the window; the big Seagrave house with its mansard roof, set in the centre of an entire city block, bounded by Madison and Fifth Avenues and by Ninety-fifth and Ninety-sixth Streets, looked out from its four red brick facades onto strips of lawn and shrubbery, now all green and golden with new grass and early buds.
It was topsy-turvy, March-hare weather, which perhaps accounted for the early April dementia that possessed the children at recurring intervals, and which nothing ever checked except the ultimate slumber of infantile exhaustion.
If anybody in the house possessed authority to punish them, nobody exercised it.

Servants grown gray in the Seagrave service endured much, partly for the children's sakes, partly in memory of the past; but the newer and younger domestics had less interest in the past glories and traditions of an old New York family which, except for two little children, ten years old, had perished utterly from the face of the land.
The entire domestic regime was a makeshift--had been almost from the beginning.

Mrs.Farren, the housekeeper, understood it; Howker, the butler, knew it; Lacy knew it--he who had served forty years as coachman in the Seagrave family.
For in all the world there remained not one living soul who through ties of kinship was authorised to properly control these children.

Nor could they themselves even remember parental authority; and only a shadowy recollection of their grandfather's lax discipline survived, becoming gradually, as time passed, nothing more personal to them than a pleasant legend kept alive and nourished in the carefully guarded stories told them by Kathleen Severn and by Anthony Seagrave's old servants.
Yet, in the land, and in his own city of Manhattan, their grandfather had been a very grand man, with his large fortune, now doubled and still increasing; he had been a very distinguished man in the world of fashion with his cultivated taste in art and wine and letters and horses; he had been a very important man, too, in the civic, social, and political construction of New York town, in the quaint days when the sexton of Old Trinity furnished fashionable hostesses with data concerning the availability of social aspirants.