"Meaning their Western origin?" inquired Shepler, blandly, with secret intent to brew strife.
"Well—er—to be sure, my dear fellow, not necessarily humble,—of course—perhaps I should have said—"
"Of course, not necessarily disgraceful, as you say, Milbrey," interrupted Shepler, "and they often do conceal it. Why, I know a chap in New York who was positively never east of Kansas City until he was twenty-five or so, and yet that fellow to-day"—he lowered his voice to the pitch of impressiveness—"has over eighty pairs of trousers and complains of the hardship every time he has to go to Boston."
"Fancy, now!" exclaimed Mrs. Drelmer, the blonde. Mr. Milbrey looked slightly puzzled and Uncle Peter chuckled, affirming mentally that Rulon Shepler must be like one of those tug-boats, with most of his lines under the surface.
"But, I say, you know, Shepler," protested one of the solemn young men, "he must still talk like a banjo."
"And gargle all his 'r's,'" added the other, very earnestly. "They never get over that, you know."
"Instead of losin' 'em entirely," put in Uncle Peter, who found himself feeling what his grandson called "Westy." "Of course, he calls it 'Ne' Yawk,' and prob'ly he don't like it in Boston because they always call 'em 'rawroystahs.'"
"Good for the old boy!" thought Percival, and then, aloud: "It is hard for the West and the East to forgive each other's dialects. The inflated 'r' and the smothered 'r' never quite harmonise."
"Western money talks good straight New York talk," ventured Miss Milbrey, with the air of one who had observed in her time.
Shepler grinned, and the parents of the young woman resisted with indifferent success their twin impulses to frown.