t they will whitewash him and gild him and make a tame
monstrosity of him. But I suppose it's inevitable. Having made his
fortune, it is the rule that he must set up as a gentleman. We do it
more simply in America. One generation makes the fortune, and leaves
it to the next generation to put on the frills. My father, for example,
never altered in the slightest degree the habits he formed when he was a
poor workman. To the day of his death, blessed old man, he remained what
he had always been--simple, pious, modest, hard-working, kindly, and
thrifty--a model peasant. Nothing ever tempted him a hair's-breadth out
of the path he had been bred to walk in. But such nobility of mind and
temper with it all! He never dreamed of suggesting that I should walk
in the same path. From my earliest childhood I cannot remember his ever
putting a limitation upon me that wasn't entirely sensible and generous.
I must have been an extremely trying daughter, but he never said so;
he never looked or acted as if he thought so.--But I never stop when I
begin talking of my father."

"It's always very sweet to me to hear you talk of him," Lady Cressage
put in. "One knows so few people who feel that way about their fathers!"

Celia nodded gravely, as if in benevolent comment upon something that
had been left unsaid. The sight of the young artist's note recalled her
earlier subject. "Of course there is a certain difference," she went
on, carelessly,--"this Mr. Thorpe is not at all a peasant, as the phrase
goes. He strikes one, sometimes, as having been educated."

"Oh, he was at a public school, Lord Plowden tells me," said the other,
with interest. "And his people were booksellers--somewhere in London--so
that he got a good smattering of literature and all that. He certainly
has more right to set up as a gentleman than nine out of ten of the
nouveaux riches one sees flaunting about nowadays. And he can talk very
well indeed--in a direct, practical sort of way. I don't quite follow
you about his niece and nephew spoiling him. Of course one can see that
they have had a great effect upon him. He sees it himself--and he's very
proud of it. He told me so, quite frankly. But why shouldn't it be a
nice effect?"

"Oh, I don't know," Celia replied, idly. "It seemed to me that he was
the kind of piratical buccaneer who oughtn't to be shaved and polished
and taught drawing-room tricks--I feel that merely in the interest
of the fitness of things. Have you