The consul hoped that it had proved successful.

“Yes, but maw guessed we didn’t care to go back to Hengist and Horsa, and when they let loose a lot of ‘Debboroughs’ and ‘Daybrooks’ upon us, maw kicked!  We’ve got a drawing ten yards long, that looks like a sour apple tree, with lots of Desboroughs hanging up on the branches like last year’s pippins, and I guess about as worm-eaten.  We took that well enough, but when it came to giving us a map of straight lines and dashes with names written under them like an old Morse telegraph slip, struck by lightning, then maw and I guessed that it made us tired.

“You know,” she went on, opening her clear gray eyes on the consul, with a characteristic flash of shrewd good sense through her quaint humor, “we never reckoned where this thing would land us, and we found we were paying a hundred pounds, not only for the Desboroughs, but all the people they’d married, and their children, and children’s children, and there were a lot of outsiders we’d never heard of, nor wanted to hear of.  Maw once thought she’d got on the trail of a Plantagenet, and followed it keen, until she found she had been reading the dreadful thing upside down.  Then we concluded we wouldn’t take any more stock in the family until it had risen.”

During this speech the consul could not help noticing that, although her attitude was playfully confidential to him, her voice really was pitched high enough to reach the ears of smaller groups around her, who were not only following her with the intensest admiration, but had shamelessly abandoned their own conversation, and had even faced towards her.  Was she really posing in her naivete?  There was a certain mischievous, even aggressive, consciousness in her pretty eyelids.  Then she suddenly dropped both eyes and voice, and said to the consul in a genuine aside, “I like this sort of thing much better.”

The consul looked puzzled.  “What sort of thing?”

“Why, all these swell people, don’t you see? those pictures on the walls! this elegant room! everything that has come down from the past, all ready and settled for you, you know—­ages ago!  Something you haven’t to pick up for yourself and worry over.”

But here the consul pointed out that the place itself was not “ancestral” as regarded the present earl, and that even the original title of his predecessors had passed away from it.  “In fact, it came into the family by one of those ‘outsiders’ you deprecate.  But I dare say you’d find the place quite as comfortable with Lord Beverdale for a host as you would if you had found out he were a cousin,” he added.

“Better,” said the young lady frankly.

“I suppose your mother participates in these preferences?” said the consul, with a smile.

“No,” said Miss Desborough, with the same frankness, “I think maw’s rather cut up at not finding a Desborough.  She was invited down here, but she’s rather independent, you know, so she allowed I could take care of myself, while she went off to stay with the old Dowager Lady Mistowe, who thinks maw a very proper womanly person.  I made maw mad by telling her that’s just what old Lady Mistowe would say of her cook—­for I can’t stand these people’s patronage.  However, I shouldn’t wonder if I was invited here as a ‘most original person.’”