and placid, this cloistered mutton was wholly uninteresting to Penrod
Schofield. Nevertheless, Roderick Magsworth Bitts, Junior, was a
personage on account of the importance of the Magsworth Bitts family;
and it was Penrod's destiny to increase Roderick's celebrity far, far
beyond its present aristocratic limitations.

The Magsworth Bittses were important because they were impressive; there
was no other reason. And they were impressive because they believed
themselves important. The adults of the family were impregnably formal;
they dressed with reticent elegance, and wore the same nose and the
same expression--an expression which indicated that they knew something
exquisite and sacred which other people could never know. Other people,
in their presence, were apt to feel mysteriously ignoble and to
become secretly uneasy about ancestors, gloves, and pronunciation. The
Magsworth Bitts manner was withholding and reserved, though sometimes
gracious, granting small smiles as great favours and giving off a
chilling kind of preciousness. Naturally, when any citizen of the
community did anything unconventional or improper, or made a mistake, or
had a relative who went wrong, that citizen's first and worst fear
was that the Magsworth Bittses would hear of it. In fact, this painful
family had for years terrorized the community, though the community
had never realized that it was terrorized, and invariably spoke of the
family as the "most charming circle in town." By common consent, Mrs.
Roderick Magsworth Bitts officiated as the supreme model as well as
critic-in-chief of morals and deportment for all the unlucky people
prosperous enough to be elevated to her acquaintance.

Magsworth was the important part of the name. Mrs. Roderick Magsworth
Bitts was a Magsworth born, herself, and the Magsworth crest decorated
not only Mrs. Magsworth Bitts' note-paper but was on the china, on the