She had a light luncheon, for it was her custom to eat but little at midday, and spent part of the afternoon with a comfortable sense of improvement over one of John Fiske’s volumes of colonial history; popular novels she abhorred as frivolities beneath her.  And then she took upon her lap a large volume, weighing perhaps a dozen pounds, entitled “Historic Families in America,” in which first place was given to an account of the glories of the De Peysters.  Though premiership was no better than the family’s due, she was secretly pleased with her forebears’ place in the volume—­in a sublimated way it was the equivalent of going in first to dinner among distinguished guests.  She liked frequently to glance leisurely through the pages, tasting here and there; and now, as she did whenever she read the familiar text, she lingered over certain passages of the deferential genealogist—­whom, hardly conscious of the act of imagination, she could almost see in tight satin breeches, postured on his knees, holding out these tributes to her on a golden salver:—­

“In 1148 Archambaud de Paster” ...  “From an early period of the fourteenth century the De Peysters were among the richest and most influential of the patrician families of Ghent” ...  “The exact genealogical connection between the De Peysters of the fourteenth century and the above-noted sixteenth and seventeenth century ancestors of the American De Peysters has not been traced, as the work of translating and analyzing the records of the intervening period is still incompleted.  Sufficient has been ascertained, however, to leave no doubt of the continual progress of the family in possessions, social dignity, and public consequence” ...  “The first man in New Amsterdam who had a family carriage” ...  “The chief people of the city and province, and stately visitors from the Old World, were often grouped together under this roof"....

Such august and ample phrases could but nourish and exalt her sense of worthiness; could but add to her growing sense of satisfaction.  She closed the ceremonious volume, and her eyes, lifting, rested for a gratifying moment on a framed steel engraving from the painting of Abraham De Peyster, Mayor of New York from 1691 to 1693.  The picture pleased her, with its aristocratically hooked nose, its full wig, its smile of amiable condescension.  But fortunately she had forgotten, or perhaps preferred not to learn, that when this ancestor was New York’s foremost figure, the city had had within its domain somewhat less than one one-thousandth of its present subjects.

And then her eyes wandered to the three-quarters portrait of herself by M. Dubois, hung temporarily in this room.  Yes, it was good.  M. Dubois had caught the peculiar De Peyster quality.  One looked at it and instinctively thought of generations processioning back into a beginningless past.  “In 1148 Archambaud de Paster” ...