“I have heard say that parlor means a place to parle in,” remarked Miss Clinton presently.
“The orioles are building in this tree,” Carl said, quite as though nothing unpleasant had happened.
She tossed her head. What did she care about orioles?
“How blood will show, both good blood and bad,” she said with the air of one who has just discovered a great truth. “Wealth, associates, travel, occupations, education, neither will efface the signature. The original stamp remains in spite of circumstances.”
At the beginning, Carl scented battle, but he assumed an air of great cheerfulness. “You are quite right,”
he said. “That great parvenu, Adam, and that still more frightfully new person, his wife, have left an indelible stain upon their progeny. We can see it to this day, faintly in some, more strongly marked in others. And, on the other hand, that prince of the ancien régime, Lucifer—”
“Nonsense!” interrupted Miss Clinton. “I was going to say, if you can stop your most disagreeable and disrespectful mocking—I was going to say that you have some of the Bohemian lounging ways of your father, though you never saw him, and though you have been under the training of Charles Yorke since your babyhood.”
“Do you think I have my father’s ways?” Carl asked, with an air of delight. “How glad I am! No one else ever told me so, and I was afraid I might be all Arnold. My mother is, of course, an angelic lady; but some of her family have had traits which—really—well, I should a little rather not inherit. And so you think me like my father? Thank you!”
“The Arnolds and the Clintons, sir, are families from whom you may be proud to inherit anything!” the old lady cried, beating the table with her fan. “They were among the élite of Boston and New York when this country was a British province. We had colonial governors and judges, sir, when your father’s people were painting signs and door-steps. It is rather late in the day, young man, for you to have to be told what my descent is!”
She stopped, choking with anger.