He could just picture the scene! He could see them getting out of
their Limousine touring car, with the chauffeur holding open the door
for them, and his father asking for a suite of rooms,--just think of
it, a suite of rooms!--at the Mariposa House.

The very thought of it turned him ill.

What! You have mistaken my meaning? Ashamed of them because they were
poor? Good heavens, no, but because they were rich! And not rich in
the sense in which they use the term in Mariposa, where a rich person
merely means a man who has money enough to build a house with a
piazza and to have everything he wants; but rich in the other
sense,--motor cars, Ritz hotels, steam yachts, summer islands and all
that sort of thing.

Why, Pupkin's father,--what's the use of trying to conceal it any
longer?--was the senior partner in the law firm of Pupkin, Pupkin and
Pupkin. If you know the Maritime Provinces at all, you've heard of
the Pupkins. The name is a household word from Chedabucto to
Chidabecto. And, for the matter of that, the law firm and the fact
that Pupkin senior had been an Attorney General was the least part of
it. Attorney General! Why, there's no money in that! It's no better
than the Senate. No, no, Pupkin senior, like so many lawyers, was
practically a promoter, and he blew companies like bubbles, and when
he wasn't in the Maritime Provinces he was in Boston and New York
raising money and floating loans, and when they had no money left in
New York he floated it in London: and when he had it, he floated on
top of it big rafts of lumber on the Miramichi and codfish on the
Grand Banks and lesser fish in the Fundy Bay. You've heard perhaps of