room, and he now sat there, sending a careful eye slowly along the
old-fashioned border, and finding it impossible to believe that any
one could seriously judge it to be grotesquely out of date.

"The carpet's all right, as far as I can see," declared Jane. "What if it
_is_ fifteen years old? Have you got one at Riverdale that is even
fifteen months old? You know you haven't; if you had you'd start a museum
of antiques with it. And as for our budging from this dear old place,
don't you look for it; we're attached to it, even if you're not. Besides,
to move would be to throw away the one advantage that we really have.
Why, think of it!" she continued with a gesticulating and wide-eyed
eloquence. "We have lived right here in this one house over thirty
years. How many families in this town have lived in one house thirty
years? Or twenty? Or even ten? We've always had the same door-plate on
the same door. We've always had the same number in the directory. We
started in a good neighborhood, and we've always stayed here--the only
one in all the town that has anything like an old-time flavor and an
atmosphere of its own--the only one where nice people have always lived
and do live yet. Isn't that better than a course of flats up one street
and down another? Isn't that better than a grand chain through a lot of
shingle-shangled cottages in the suburbs? I should say so. What are they
doing in the East now? They're going back to their old neighborhoods, and
the people who haven't left them at all are the ones who are right on the
top of the pile. We might have some new furniture or something of the
sort, perhaps; but that's different from asking the moving-wagons to come
and cart us out on to the prairie."

David Marshall followed his daughter's harangue with an indulgent
interest and a sympathy by no means scant. He had no profound
apprehension of social values, and no clear-cut conception of a social