generally assumed the first settlers landed on the Atlantic seaboard and
self-sacrificingly accepted real estate from the wily native in return
for whisky and glass beads. She was forty-seven years of age, a Colonial
Dame, a Daughter of the American Revolution, a member of the board of
directors of several charitable institutions, and she was worth a couple
of million dollars in railroad securities. On Sundays she always
attended the church in Stuyvesant Square frequented by her family, and
as late as 1907 did so in the famous Beekman C-spring victoria driven
by an aged negro coachman.

But besides being full of rectitude and good works--which of themselves
so often fail of attraction--Miss Althea was possessed of a face so
charming even in its slightly faded prettiness that one wondered how it
was possible that she could successfully have withstood the suitors who
must have crowded about her. Her house on Fifth Avenue was full of old
engravings of American patriots, and the library inherited from her
editorial parent was replete with volumes upon subjects which would have
filled a Bolshevik with disgust. Briefly, if ever Trotzky had become
Commissar of the Soviet of Manhattan, Miss Althea and those like her
would have been the first candidates for a drumhead court-martial.

She prided herself equally upon her adherence to religious principle and
the Acts of Congress. For the law, merely as law, she had the
profoundest veneration, viewing the heterogeneous statutes passed from
time to time by desultory legislators much as if they had in some
mysterious way been handed down from Mount Sinai along with the Ten
Commandments.

For any violator of the law she had the uttermost abhorrence, and the
only weakness in her ethics arose out of her failure to discriminate