Parkinson,
for instance, who had lunched at Oyster Bay only last Thursday,
according to the _Lichfield Courier-Herald_. And, meanwhile, the men of
her husband's generation clung to their old mansions, and were
ornamental, certainly, and were, very certainly, profoundly
self-satisfied; for they adhered to the customs of yesterday under the
comfortable delusion that this was the only way to uphold yesterday's
ideals. But what, in heaven's name, had any of these men of Rudolph
Musgrave's circle ever done beyond enough perfunctory desk-work, say, to
furnish him food and clothes?

"A hamlet of Hamlets," was Patricia's verdict as to Lichfield--"whose
actual tragedy isn't that their fathers were badly treated, but that
they themselves are constitutionally unable to do anything except talk
about how badly their fathers were treated."

No, it was not altogether that these men were indolent. Rudolph and
Rudolph's peers had been reared in the belief that when any manual labor
became inevitable, you as a matter of course entrusted its execution to
a negro; and, forced themselves to labor, they not unnaturally complied
with an ever-present sense of unfair treatment, and, in consequence,
performed the work inefficiently. Lichfield had no doubt preserved a
comely manner of living; but it had produced in the last half-century
nothing of real importance except John Charteris.

VIII

For Charteris was important. Patricia was rereading all the books that
Charteris had published, and they engrossed her with an augmenting
admiration.

But it is unnecessary to dilate upon the marvelous and winning pictures
of life in Lichfield before the War between the States which Charteris
has painted in his novels. "Even as the king of birds that with
unwearied wing soars nearest to the sun, yet wears upon his breast the
softest down,"--as we learn from no less eminent authority than that of
the _Lichfield Courier-Herald_--"so Mr. Charteris is equally expert in
depicting the derring-do and tenderness of those glorious days of
chivalry, of fair women and brave men, of gentle breeding, of splendid
culture and wholesome living."

Patricia was not a little puzzled by these books. The traditional
Lichfield, she decided in the outcome, may very possibly have been just
the trick-work of a charlatan's cleverness; but, even in that event,
here were the tales of life in Lichfield--ardent, sumptuous and
fragrant throughout with the fragrance of lov