le was Danish; some one
had said something about having seen it in Schleswig-Holstein.

Mrs. Portico had a bold, humorous, slightly flamboyant look; people who
saw her for the first time received an impression that her late husband
had married the daughter of a barkeeper or the proprietress of a
menageria. Her high, hoarse, good-natured voice seemed to connect her in
some way with public life; it was not pretty enough to suggest that she
might have been an actress. These ideas quickly passed away, however,
even if you were not sufficiently initiated to know--as all the
Grossies, for instance, knew so well--that her origin, so far from
being enveloped in mystery, was almost the sort of thing she might have
boasted of. But in spite of the high pitch of her appearance, she didn't
boast of anything; she was a genial, easy, comical, irreverent person,
with a large charity, a democratic, fraternizing turn of mind, and a
contempt for many worldly standards, which she expressed not in the
least in general axioms (for she had a mortal horror of philosophy), but
in violent ejaculations on particular occasions. She had not a grain of
moral timidity, and she fronted a delicate social problem as sturdily as
she would have barred the way of a gentleman she might have met in her
vestibule with the plate-chest The only thing which prevented her being
a bore in orthodox circles was that she was incapable of discussion. She
never lost her temper, but she lost her vocabulary, and ended quietly
by praying that Heaven would give her an opportunity to _show_ what she
believed.

She was an old friend of Mr. and Mrs. Gressie, who esteemed her for the
antiquity of her lineage and the frequency of her subscriptions, and to
whom she rendered the service of making them feel liberal,--like
people too sure of their own position to be frightened. She was their
indulgence, their dissipation, their point of contact with dangerous
heresies; so long as they continued to see her they could not be accused
of being narrow-minded,--a matter as to which they were perhaps vaguely
conscious of the necessity of taking their precautions. Mrs. Portico
never asked herself whether she liked the Gressies; she had no
disposition for morbid analysis, she accepted transmitted associations,
and she found, somehow, that her acquaintance with these people helped
her to relieve herself. She was always making scenes in their
drawing-room, scenes half indignant, half jocose,