had feasted under the trees amid all the loveliness of mellow-tinted
hills, now ordered by telephone a luncheon of cut-and-dried courses, and
motored down to eat it. After that, they looked at the horses, and with
the feeling upon them of the futility of such shows yawned a bit. In due
season, they held, the horse would be as extinct as the Dodo, and as
mythical as the Centaur.

The Judge argued hotly for the things which had been. Love of the horse
was bred in the bone of Old Dominion men. He swore by all the gods that
when he had to part with his bays and ride behind gasoline, he would be
ready to die.

Becky agreed with her grandfather. She adored the old traditions, and
she adored the Judge. She spent two months of every year with him in his
square brick house in Albemarle surrounded by unprofitable acres. The
remaining two months of her vacation were given to her mother's father,
Admiral Meredith, whose fortune had come down to him from whale-hunting
ancestors. The Admiral lived also in a square brick house, but it had no
acres, for it was on the Main Street of Nantucket town, with a Captain's
walk on top, and a spiral staircase piercing its middle.

The other eight months of the year Becky had spent at school in an old
convent in Georgetown. She was a Protestant and a Presbyterian; the
Nantucket grandfather was a Unitarian of Quaker stock, Judge Bannister
was High Church, and it was his wife's Presbyterianism which had been
handed down to Becky. Religion had therefore nothing to do with her
residence at the school. A great many of the Bannister girls had been
educated at convents, and when a Bannister had done a thing once it was
apt to be done again.