"Since when?" I asked, and stared in astonishment.
"I found them in the dictionary six months ago. I had it done at Tiffany's. It looks so stylish on the plates and the writing paper."
"Come in here, Susan," and I led her into her own parlour, for I did not wish to lower her in the estimation of that noble being who was preparing his mighty mind to show me out. "Listen to me; you and Joe haven't any more to do with the Duke of Bedford than the cat's foot. Besides, his name isn't Bedford but Russell. For goodness' sake don't make such an idiot of yourself."
"I guess," and Susan was deeply offended, "I guess the young man at Tiffany's knows more about it than you do. He engraves for the first families, and he said it was all right."
It was quite recently, too, that I crossed from Boston with three gentle female pilgrims in search of an ancestor. The youngest was nearly seventy, and we were barely out of sight of that famous tail of land called "Cape Cod" when they told me their simple story. They came from Cape Cod and their homestead stood on a sandhill and faced the sea. A long straggling street up a sand bank culminated in a meeting-house with a steeple as sharp as a toothpick. They were innocent and graphic old ladies and they had only two vivid interests in life; one was a Devonshire ancestor supposed to have died three hundred years before, and the other, two cats called respectively Priscilla and John Alden. The ancestor was the one romance of their placid lives, and it became a question of going to find him, now or never; so here they were. They had turned the key in the lock of their Cape Cod homestead and bidden a long farewell to Priscilla and John Alden, and as they described their grief I saw their three pairs of benevolent eyes fill with tears.
"The sweetest cats that ever breathed," said the oldest, with a face like a benediction.
"What did you do with them?" I asked after a sympathetic pause.
"We chloroformed them," said the dear old thing whose face was like a benediction.
I offered up an involuntary smile to the manes of these deceased martyrs, Priscilla and John Alden, and I am absolutely sure the ancestor wasn't worth the sacrifice.
Fortunately or unfortunately, the champagne standard, like hotel cooking, has no nationality. It is everywhere, and one studies it according to one's experience, but it is undoubtedly the curse of an age that only judges of success by material results. It is above everything a menace to character.