kitchen she was thereby relieved from her duty toward those who occupied
it. Nevertheless, from the altitude of those three stories she viewed
them as essentially different from herself, for she came of what is
known as "a long line of ancestors." As, however, Katie O'Connell and
Althea Beekman were practically contemporaries, it is somewhat difficult
to understand how one of them could have had a succession of ancestors
that was any longer than that of the other. Indeed, Miss Beekman's
friend, Prof. Abelard Samothrace, of Columbia University, probably would
have admitted that just as the two had lived in the same house--albeit
at different levels--on Fifth Avenue, so their forebears at some
prehistoric period had, likely as not, occupied the same cave and had in
company waded on frosty mornings the ice-skimmed swamps of Mittel Europa
in pursuit of the cave bear, the mastodon and the woolly rhinoceros, and
for afternoon relaxation had made up twosomes for hunting wives with
stone clubs instead of mashies in their hairy prehensile hands.

It would seem, therefore, that--whatever of tradition might have
originated in the epoch in question--glimmerings of sportsmanship, of
personal pride, of tribal duty or of conscience ought to have been the
common heritage of them both. For it was assuredly true that while Miss
Katie's historic ancestors had been Celtiberians, clad on occasion only
in a thin coating of blue paint, Miss Althea's had dwelt in the dank
marshes of the Elbe and had been unmistakably Teutonic, though this
curse had been largely removed by racial intermarriage during subsequent
thousands of years. Indeed, it may well have been that in the dimmer
past some Beekman serf on bended knee had handed a gilded harp to some
King O'Connell on his throne. If the O'Connells were foreigners the
Beekmans, from the point of view of the aboriginal American, were no
less so simply because they had preceded them by a couple of hundred
years.