summer and autumn the rooms were delightful, with their old-
fashioned solid furniture, their subdued colors and tints, their
elaborate arrangements for regulating the inpour of light. All
this suggested wealth. But the Severances were not rich. They had
about the same amount of money that old Lucius Quintus had left;
but, just as the neighborhood seemed to have degenerated when in
fact it had remained all but unchanged, so the Severence fortune
seemed to have declined, altogether through changes of standard
elsewhere. The Severances were no poorer; simply, other people of
their class had grown richer, enormously richer. The Severence
homestead, taken by itself and apart from its accidental setting
of luxurious grounds, was a third-rate American dwelling-house,
fine for a small town, but plain for a city. And the Severence
fortune by contrast with the fortunes so lavishly displayed in the
fashionable quarter of the capital, was a meager affair, just
enough for comfort; it was far too small for the new style of
wholesale entertainment which the plutocracy has introduced from
England, where the lunacy for aimless and extravagant display
rages and ravages in its full horror of witless vulgarity. Thus,
the Severences from being leaders twenty years before, had shrunk
into "quiet people," were saved from downright obscurity and
social neglect only by the indomitable will and tireless energy of
old Cornelia Bowker.

Cornelia Bowker was not a Severence; in fact she was by birth
indisputably a nobody. Her maiden name was Lard, and the Lards
were "poor white trash." By one of those queer freaks wherewith
nature loves to make mockery of the struttings of men, she was
endowed with ambition and with the intelligence and will to make
it effective. Her first ambition was education; by performing