Then there was Mrs. Kyme, a pretty, light-hearted lady, still young, who seemed to have no intention of growing older, who romped and played songs for us on the piano.  The daughter of an old but now impecunious Westchester family, she had been born to adorn the position she held, she was adapted by nature to wring from it the utmost of the joys it offered.  From her, rather than from her husband, both of the children seemed to have inherited.  I used to watch Mr. Grosvenor Kyme as he sat at the end of the dinner-table, dark, preoccupied, taciturn, symbolical of a wealth new to my experience, and which had about it a certain fabulous quality.  It toiled not, neither did it spin, but grew as if by magic, day and night, until the very conception of it was overpowering.  What must it be to have had ancestors who had been clever enough to sit still until a congested and discontented Europe had begun to pour its thousands and hundreds of thousands into the gateway of the western world, until that gateway had become a metropolis? ancestors, of course, possessing what now suddenly appeared to me as the most desirable of gifts—­since it reaped so dazzling a harvest-business foresight.  From time to time these ancestors had continued to buy desirable corners, which no amount of persuasion had availed to make them relinquish.  Lease them, yes; sell them, never!  By virtue of such a system wealth was as inevitable as human necessity; and the thought of human necessity did not greatly bother me.  Mr. Kyme’s problem of life was not one of making money, but of investing it.  One became automatically a personage....

It was due to one of those singular coincidences—­so interesting a subject for speculation—­that the man who revealed to me this golden romance of the Kyme family was none other than a resident of my own city, Mr. Theodore Watling, now become one of our most important and influential citizens; a corporation lawyer, new and stimulating qualification, suggesting as it did, a deus ex machina of great affairs.  That he, of all men, should come to Weathersfield astonished me, since I was as yet to make the connection between that finished, decorous, secluded existence and the source of its being.  The evening before my departure he arrived in company with two other gentlemen, a Mr. Talbot and a Mr. Saxes, whose names were spoken with respect in a sphere of which I had hitherto taken but little cognizance-Wall Street.  Conybear informed me that they were “magnates,"...  We were sitting in the drawing-room at tea, when they entered with Mr. Watling, and no sooner had he spoken to Mrs. Kyme than his quick eye singled me out of the group.

“Why, Hugh!” he exclaimed, taking my hand.  “I had no idea I should meet you here—­I saw your father only last week, the day I left home.”  And he added, turning to Mrs. Kyme, “Hugh is the son of Mr. Matthew Paret, who has been the leader of our bar for many years.”