"Fairchild," said Mrs. Castleton. "The name is familiar to me. Oh, now I remember. But they can't be the same. The Fairchilds I knew were people in humble circumstances. They lived in —— street."
"Yes. I dare say they are the very people," replied Miss Rutherford. "He has made money rapidly within a few years."
"But she was the best little creature I ever knew," persisted Mrs. Castleton. "My baby was taken ill while we were in the country boarding at the same house, and this Mrs. Fairchild came to me at once, and helped me get a warm bath, and watched and nursed the child with me as if it had been her own. I remember I was very grateful for her excessive kindness and attention."
"Well, I dare say," replied Miss Rutherford. "But that was when she was poor, and, as you say, humble, Mrs. Castleton. Very probably she may have been kind-hearted originally. She does love her children dearly. She has that merit; but now that she is rich, and wants to be fine and fashionable, and don't know how to manage it, and can't succeed, you never knew any body so spiteful and jealous as she is of all those she feels beyond her reach."
"Pity," said Mrs. Castleton almost sorrowfully. "She was such a good little creature. How prosperity spoils some people."
And so Mrs. Fairchild traveled and came home again.
They had been to Paris, and seen more things and places than they could remember, and did not understand what they could remember, and were afraid of telling what they had seen, lest they should mispronounce names, whose spelling was beyond their most ambitious flights.
They had gone to the ends of the earth to be in society at home. But ignorant they went and ignorant they returned.
"Edward and Fanny shall know every thing," said Mrs. Fairchild, and teachers without end were engaged for the young Fairchilds, who, to their parents' great delight were not only chatting in "unknown tongues," but becoming quite intimate with the little Ashfields and other baby sprigs of nobility.
"Who is that pretty boy dancing with your Helen, Mrs. Bankhead?" asked some one at a child's party.