was, although both her husband and son had got all their education
in the town schools, and had worked in shoe-shops all their lives.
She could have looked at a palace or a castle, and have remained
true to the splendors of her little one-story-and-a-half house with
a best parlor and sitting-room, and a shed kitchen for use in hot
weather.

She would not for one instant have been swerved from utmost
admiration and faith in her set of white-and-gold wedding china by
the contemplation of Copeland and Royal Sèvres. She would have
pitted her hair-cloth furniture of the ugliest period of household
art against all the Chippendales and First Empire pieces in
existence.

As Mrs. Zelotes had never seen any household possessions to equal
her own, let alone to surpass them, she was of the same mind with
regard to her husband and his family, herself and her family, her
son and little granddaughter. She never saw any gowns and shawls
which compared with hers in fineness and richness; she never tasted
a morsel of cookery which was not as sawdust when she reflected upon
her own; and all that humiliated her in the least, or caused her to
feel in the least dissatisfied, was her son's wife and her family
and antecedents.

Mrs. Zelotes Brewster had considered that her son Andrew was
marrying immeasurably beneath him when he married Fanny Loud, of
Loudville. Loudville was a humble, an almost disreputably humble,
suburb of the little provincial city. The Louds from whom the
locality took its name were never held in much repute, being
considered of a stratum decidedly below the ordinary social one of