“We have a good many portraits of members of the family,” she said, “some of them older than the china.”

“How very very odd!  What do the dear old things look like?”

“One was a great beauty in her time.”

“How jolly!”

“Another was a young woman who was put to death for her religion,—­burned to ashes at the stake in Queen Mary’s time.”

“How very very wicked!  It was n’t nice a bit, was it?  Ain’t you telling me stories?  Was that a hundred years ago?—­But you ’ve got some new pictures and things, have n’t you?  Who furnished your parlors?”

“My great-grandfather, or his father, I believe.”

“Stuff and nonsense.  I don’t believe it.  What color are your carriage-horses?”

“Our woman, Kitty Fagan, told somebody once we didn’t keep any horse but a cow.”

“Not keep any horses!  Do for pity’s sake let me look at your feet.”

Myrtle put out as neat a little foot as a shoemaker ever fitted with a pair of number two.  What she would have been tempted to do with it, if she had been a boy, we will not stop to guess.  After all, the questions amused her quite as much as the answers instructed Miss Clara Browne.  Of that young lady’s ancestral claims to distinction there is no need of discoursing.  Her “papaa” commonly said sir in talking with a gentleman, and her “mammaa” would once in a while forget, and go down the area steps instead of entering at the proper door; but they lived behind a brown stone front, which veneers everybody’s antecedents with a facing of respectability.

Miss Clara Browne wrote home to her mother in the same terms as Miss Florence Smythe,—­that the school was getting dreadful common, and they were letting in very queer folks.

Still another trial awaited Myrtle, and one which not one girl in a thousand would have been so unprepared to meet.  She knew absolutely nothing of certain things with which the vast majority of young persons were quite familiar.

There were literary young ladies, who had read everything of Dickens and Thackeray, and something at least of Sir Walter, and occasionally, perhaps, a French novel, which they had better have let alone.  One of the talking young ladies of this set began upon Myrtle one day.

“Oh, is n’t ‘Pickwick’ nice?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” Myrtle replied; “I never tasted any.”

The girl stared at her as if she were a crazy creature.  “Tasted any!  Why, I mean the ‘Pickwick Papers,’ Dickens’s story.  Don’t you think they’re nice.”

Poor Myrtle had to confess that she had never read them, and did n’t know anything about them.

“What! did you never read any novels?” said the young lady.

“Oh, to be sure I have,” said Myrtle, blushing as she thought of the great trunk and its contents.  “I have read ‘Caleb Williams,’ and ‘Evelina,’ and ‘Tristram Shandy’” (naughty girl!), “and the ’Castle of Otranto,’ and the ‘Mysteries of Udolpho,’ and the ‘Vicar of Wakefield,’ and ’Don Quixote’—­”