On a short, hard sofa near the fire, beside Fatty, who bloomed like a white rose under the red-shaded light, she listened to Mrs. Fowler’s unflagging efforts to “get on” with the judge’s wife.  Never had the dauntless little woman revealed more surprising resourcefulness, never had she talked so vivaciously, never had she appeared so relentlessly pleasant.  It was as if she said in the face of Mrs. Crowborough’s insensibility, which was the insensibility not of mind, but of inanimate matter, “Whatever you do, you can’t keep me from being sweet.”  And in this strained sweetness there was something touching, something wistful, a hint of inner weariness which showed now and then beneath the restless vivacity.

“Isn’t it funny,” said Patty suddenly, “how much mamma cares about things that don’t matter at all?  You wouldn’t believe it to look at her, but she is in her heart the most worldly one of the family.  Father wouldn’t give a tallow candle for anything that isn’t real.”

A log broke in the centre, and fell, scattering a shower of golden embers over the hearth.  Rising quickly, with one of her sprightly movements, Mrs. Fowler reached for a pair of small brass tongs and pushed the broken log back on the andirons.  Then she threw some fresh wood on the flames, and resumed her seat with an animated gesture as if the incident had enlivened her.

“Now they are talking about the everlasting Pletheridges,” whispered Patty.  “I never understand how mother can take so much interest in those people just because they are rich.”

But to Gabriella it was more inconceivable still that her mother-in-law, with the bluest blood of Virginia in her veins, should regard with such artless reverence the social activities of the granddaughter of a tavern-keeper.  In her native State an impoverished branch of Mrs. Fowler’s family still lived on land which, tradition said, had been granted one of her ancestors by Charles the Second in recognition of distinguished services to that dubious monarch; yet she could long enviously for a closer acquaintance with the plutocratic descendant of an Irish tavern-keeper—­an honest man, doubtless, who had laid the foundations of his fortune in a string of halfway houses stretching from New York to Chicago.

“Yes, I dined with Mrs. Pletheridge once,” she was saying in the tone in which her royalist ancestor might have acknowledged a command from his King.

“It always makes me angry, I can’t help it,” pursued Patty.  “If dear mamma had only some other weakness—­cards or wine or clothes or anything else.  It’s queer, with all her pride, how little social backbone she has.  Now to hear her talk, you would imagine that that vulgar snob, whose father kept hotels and married one of his chambermaids, had conferred an honour by inviting her to dinner.  And the funniest part is that, for all her good breeding, and her family portraits, and her titled ancestors, mother hasn’t half so much respect for the genuine New Yorkers—­I mean the New Yorkers whose names really mean something—­as she has for these mushroom plutocrats.  She had set her heart on George marrying one of them, you know, but it’s a jolly good thing he didn’t.”