"There was Aunt Adelaide. Grandpapa found her one day acting in a play in the town hall in the little village where they went for the summer—right on the stage with all those travelling actors. She actually wanted to go with them!"
"Absurd!" said her husband, selecting and peeling for her a specially fine peach.
"But grandpapa himself," she went on thoughtfully, "threatened to go as a common sailor before the mast, rather than be tied down to business—papa showed me a letter he wrote once; he said it was sickening to him to think of putting up the shutters every night and heaping up money in a strong-box."
"How about your great-grandfather?" he asked idly. "I don't know about him," she said, "except that I am named for my great-grandmother. They were the first Appleyards to come to this country, you know."
"I know," he said politely. He himself traced his ancestry to a cousin of Henry of Navarre, and was furiously proud of it, though wild horses could not have dragged from him an allusion to it.
They dipped into the heavy crystal finger bowls in silence. Then, as a sudden curious idea struck him,
"But how do you account, on that theory, for your own generation?" he asked. "Certainly no one could call Johnny wild?"
"Poor old Johnny!" she said, laughing, "no, indeed! The wildest step he ever took was to put type-writing machines in the bank!"
"Then, is it you?" he demanded, and smiled gravely, for her dignified young matronhood was his pride.
"It may come out in me later," she threatened, "for Appleyards don't change, you know."