“Well, well, so little Gabriella went to New York and became a dressmaker,” observed Jimmy, who was seldom original, “and she’s the same Gabriella, too.  I always said, you know, that she was the sort you could count on.”

Age, though it had not entirely passed him by, had, on the whole, treated him with great gentleness.  He was a remarkably handsome old man, with a distinguished and courtly presence, a head of wonderful white hair, which looked as if it had been powdered, a ruddy unwrinkled face, and the dark shining eyes of the adventurous youth he had never lost.

“Of course, she couldn’t have been a dressmaker here where everybody knows her,” purred Cousin Pussy, with her arm about Gabriella, “but in New York it is different, and they tell me that even titled women are dressmakers in London.”

“Well, she has pluck,” declared Cousin Jimmy, as he had declared eighteen years ago at the family council.  “There’s nothing like pluck when it comes to getting along in the world.”

Then they sat down in Jane’s library, which, contained most of the things Gabriella associated with the old parlour in Hill Street, and Cousin Pussy asked if Gabriella had found many changes.

“A great many.  Everything, looks new to me except this room.  The only thing I miss here is the horsehair sofa.”

“I keep that in the back hall,” said Jane.  “The town does look different up here, but the Peytons’ house is just as you remember it—­even the scarlet sage is in the garden.  Miss Nelly plants it still every summer.”

A lovely light shone in Gabriella’s eyes, and Cousin Pussy watched it tenderly, while a smile hovered about the corners of her shrewd though still pretty mouth.

“It has been such a disappointment that Arthur hasn’t done more in his profession,” she said presently, “but, as I was saying to Mr. Wrenn only the other day, I have always felt that dear Gabriella was to blame for it.”

“The trouble with Arthur,” observed Charley, awaking truculently from his doze, “is that he’s got the wrong ideas.  When a man has the wrong ideas in these days, he might as well go out and hang himself.”

“Well, I don’t know that I’d call his ideas wrong exactly,” reasoned Cousin Jimmy, with the judicial manner befitting the best judge of tobacco in Virginia; “I shouldn’t call them wrong, but they’re out of date.  They belong to the last century.”

“I always say that dear Arthur is a perfect gentleman of the old school,” remonstrated Mrs. Carr, meekly obstinate.  “There aren’t many of them left now, so I tell myself regretfully whenever I see him.”

“And there’ll be fewer than ever by the time you Suffragists get your rights,” remarked Charley, with bitterness, while Mrs. Carr, incensed by the word, which she associated with various indelicacies, stared at him with an indignant expression.

“Charley, be careful what you say,” nagged Jane acridly from her corner.  “Now that so many of our relatives have gone in for suffrage, you mustn’t be intolerant.”