ith a straggling
length of hose; Margaret and Julie shelling peas on the side steps.
Margaret laughed, coloring a little.

"Why, we're just as good as they are, Mother!"

Mrs. Paget drenched a dried little dump of carnations.

"We're as good," she admitted; "but we're not as rich, or
as travelled,--we haven't the same ideas; we belong to a
different class."

"Oh, no, we don't, Mother," Margaret said quickly. "Who are the Carr
Boldts, except for their money? Why, Mrs. Carteret,--for all her
family!--isn't half the aristocrat Grandma was! And you--you could be
a Daughter of The Officers of the Revolution, Mother!"

"Why, Mark, I never heard that!" her mother protested, cleaning
the sprinkler with a hairpin.

"Mother!" Julie said eagerly. "Great-grandfather Quincy!"

"Oh, Grandpa," said Mrs. Paget. "Yes, Grandpa was a paymaster. He was
on Governor Hancock's staff. They used to call him 'Major.' But Mark--"
she turned off the water, holding her skirts away from the
combination of mud and dust underfoot, "that's a very silly way to
talk, dear! Money does make a difference; it does no good to go back
into the past and say that this one was a judge and that one a major;
we must live our lives where we are!"

Margaret had not lost a wholesome respect for her mother's opinion in
the two years she had been away, but she had lived in a very different
world, and was full of new ideas.

"Mother, do you mean to tell me that if you and Dad hadn't had a
perfect pack of children, and moved so much, and if Dad--say--had been
in that oil deal that he said he wished he had the money for, and we
still lived in the brick house, that you wouldn't be in every way the
equal of Mrs. Carr-Boldt?"

"If you mean as far as money goes, Mark,--no. We might have been well
to-do as country people go, I suppose--"

"Exactly!" said Margaret; "and you would have been as well off as
dozens of the people who are going about in society this minute! It's
the merest chance that we aren't rich. Just for instance: father's
father had twelve children, didn't he?--and left them--how much was
it?--about three thousand dollars apiece--"

"And a Godsend it was, too," said her mother, reflectively.

"But suppose Dad had been the only child, Mother," Margaret persisted,
"he would have had--"

"He would have had the whole thirty-six thousand dollars,
I suppose, Mark."

"Or more," said Margaret, "for Grandfather Paget was presumably
spending money on