others do their share of the work."

V.

THE ARRIVAL OF THE HILBROUGHS.

Of course there is a small set who affect not to mingle freely with
newly prosperous people like the Hilbroughs. These are they in whose
estimation wealth and distinction only gain their proper flavor--their
bouquet, so to speak--by resting stagnant for three generations, for
gentility, like game, acquires an admirable highness by the lapse of
time. Descendants of the Lord knows whom, with fortunes made the devil
knows how, fondly imagine that a village storekeeper who has risen to
affluence is somehow inferior to the grandson of a Dutch sailor who
amassed a fortune by illicit trade with the Madagascar pirates, or a
worse trade in rum and blackamoors on the Guinea coast, and that a
quondam bookkeeper who has fairly won position and money by his own
shrewdness is lower down than the lineal descendant of an Indian trader
who waxed great by first treating and then cheating shivering Mohawks.
Which only shows that we are prone to plant ourselves on the sound
traditions of ancestors; for where is the aristocracy which does not
regard wealth won by ancient thievery as better than money modernly
earned in a commonplace way? But among a gentry so numerous and so
democratic, in spite of itself, as that of our American Babel,
exclusiveness works discomfort mainly to the exclusive. The Hilbroughs
are agreeable Americans, their suppers are provided by the best
caterers, their house has been rendered attractive by boughten taste,
and the company one sees there is not more stupid than that in other
miscellaneous assemblies.

People who are Livingstons of the manor on their great-grandmother's
side, and Van Something-or-others on the side of a great-great-uncle by
his second marriage, and who perhaps have never chanced to be asked to
the Hilbroughs' receptions, shrug their shoulders, and tell you that
they do not know them. But Mrs. Hilbrough does not slight such families
because of the colonialness of their ancestry. Her own progenitors came
to America in some capacity long before the disagreement about the Stamp
Act, though they were not brilliant enough to buy small kingdoms from
the Hudson River Indians with jews'-harps and cast-iron hatchets, nor
supple enough to get manor lordships by bribes to royal governors.

I suppose the advent of the Hilbroughs in society might be dated from
the first reception they gave in New York, though, for that ma