motto, and he lived up to it, and, as a consequence, no more sound
institution of the kind existed in his neighborhood. He and his
directors were slow to adopt innovations of any kind; they put stumbling
blocks in the path of business convenience whenever they could; in
short, David Price in his humble way was a righteous, narrow, hide-bound
retarder of progress and worshipper of established local custom.
Therefore it was a constant source of surprise and worry to him that he
should have a progressive daughter. There were four other children,
patterns of quiet, plodding conservatism, but--such is the irony of
fate--the youngest, prettiest, and his favorite, was an independent,
opinionated young woman, who seemed to turn a deaf ear to paternal and
maternal advice of safest New Jersey type. In her father's words, she
had no reverence for any thing or any body, which was approximately
true, for she did not hesitate to speak disrespectfully even of the head
of the house in New York.

"Poppa," she said one day, "Cousin Morton doesn't care for any of us a
little bit. I know what you're going to say," she added; "that he sends
you two turkeys every Thanksgiving. The last were terribly tough. I'm
sure he thinks that we never see turkeys here in New Jersey, and that he
considers us poor relations and that we live in a hole. If one of us
should call on him, I know it would distress him awfully. He's right in
thinking that this is a hole. Nothing ever happens here, and when I
marry I intend to live in New York."

This was when she was seventeen. Her father was greatly shocked,
especially as he suspected in his secret soul that the tirade was true
in substance. He had been the recipient of Thanksgiving turkeys for
nearly twenty years on the plea that they had been grown on the donor's
farm in Westchester county, and he had seen fit to invite his