olice in their search for James
Preston, the forger of the Jefferson letters. What a fool Judge Harvey
had been in that affair!...

And yet, in a way, she was sorry. She had liked Judge Harvey; had
liked him very much. In fact, there had been relaxed moods in which
she had dallied pleasantly with the thought of marrying him. She
might, indeed, have married him already had it not been for the
obvious social descent.

Also, she thought for a moment of Miss Gardner. In this matter she
had likewise been quite right. However, aside from the deception Miss
Gardner had practiced, she had seemed a nice girl; and Mrs. De Peyster
was lenient enough to feel a very honest wish that the husband, who
had so rapidly disappeared, was a decent sort of man. Perhaps later
she might favor them with some trifling present.

She had a light luncheon, for it was her custom to eat but little at
midday, and spent part of the afternoon with a comfortable sense of
improvement over one of John Fiske's volumes of colonial history;
popular novels she abhorred as frivolities beneath her. And then she
took upon her lap a large volume, weighing perhaps a dozen pounds,
entitled "Historic Families in America," in which first place
was given to an account of the glories of the De Peysters. Though
premiership was no better than the family's due, she was secretly
pleased with her forebears' place in the volume--in a sublimated way
it was the equivalent of going in first to dinner among distinguished
guests. She liked frequently to glance leisurely through the pages,
tasting here and there; and now, as she did whenever she read the
familiar text, she lingered over certain passages of the deferential
genealogist--whom, hardly conscious of the act of imagination, she
could almost see in tight satin breeches, postured on his knees,
holding out these tributes to her on a golden salver:--

"In 1148 Archambaud de Paster" ... "From an early period of the
fourteenth century the De Peysters were among the richest and most
influential of the patrician families of Ghent" ... "The exact
genealogical connection between the De Peysters of the fourteenth
century and the above-noted sixteenth and seventeenth century
ancestors of the American De Peysters has not been traced, as the work
of translating and analyzing the records of the intervening period is
still incompleted. Sufficient has been ascertained, however, to leave
no doubt of the continual progress of the famil