“Education, after all, papa, is like a trade.  A man may be able to handle all the tools and not know their names.  Now, you are a well-informed man, but, because you didn’t know logic, grammar, scientific terms, and the like, you thought yourself ignorant.”

In the new confidence in himself he was surprised at his own ability in launching a subject in the presence of his eminent friends when especially Kate was on hand to support the conversation.  She got him not only to buy fine pictures, as most rich men do, but she made him see wherein their value lay, so that when artists and amateurs came to admire his treasures, he could talk to them without gross solecisms.

“I’m not a liberal education to you, papa, as Steele said of the Duchess of Devonshire.  That implies too much, but I am an index.  You can find out what you need to know by keeping track of my ignorance.”

Elisha Boone’s domestic circle was a termagancy—­as Kate often told his guests—­tempered by wit and good-humor.  He was prouder of his daughter than of his self-made rank or his revered million.  In moments of expansive good-nature he invited business or political associates to “Acre Villa,” as his place was called, to enjoy the surprise Kate’s graces wrought in the guests.  But these were not always times of delight to the doting parent.  Kate was a shrewd judge of the amenities; and if the personages who came, at the father’s bidding, gave the least sign of a not unnatural surprise to find a girl so well bred and self-contained in the daughter of such a man as Boone, she became very frigid and left the father to do the honors of the evening visit.  No entreaty could move her to reappear on the scene.  In time, the prodigal papa was careful to submit a list of the names of his proposed guests, as chamberlains give royalty a descriptive list of those to be bidden to court.

Kate was on terms that, if not cordial, were not constrained, with the Spragues.  She had gone to the same seminary with Olympia, had danced with Jack, and, in the cadetship affair, had plainly given her opinion that her brother Wesley, having no taste or fitness for military life, Jack, who had, should have the prize.  But two motives entered into the father’s determination:  one was to annoy and humiliate the Spragues; the other, the sleepless craving of the parvenu to get for his son what had not been his, in spite of all the adulation paid him—­the conceded equality of social condition.  The army was then, as I believe it is considered now, the surest sign of higher caste in a democracy.  Wesley, by the mere right to epaulets, would be of the acknowledged gentility.  Nobody could sneer at him; no doors could be opened grudgingly when he called.  He would, in virtue of his West Point insignia, be a knighted member of the blood royal of the republic.  Some of this mysterious unction would distill itself into the unconsecrated ichor of the rest of the family, and Kate, as well