I wonder if I can convey the effect of her to you.  She was a little old lady with extraordinarily flaxen hair, her weak aquiline features were pursed up into an assumption of dignity, and she was richly dressed.  I would like to underline that “richly dressed,” or have the words printed in florid old English or Gothic lettering.  No one on earth is now quite so richly dressed as she was, no one old or young indulges in so quiet and yet so profound a sumptuosity.  But you must not imagine any extravagance of outline or any beauty or richness of color.  The predominant colors were black and fur browns, and the effect of richness was due entirely to the extreme costliness of the materials employed.  She affected silk brocades with rich and elaborate patterns, priceless black lace over creamy or purple satin, intricate trimmings through which threads and bands of velvet wriggled, and in the winter rare furs.  Her gloves fitted exquisitely, and ostentatiously simple chains of fine gold and pearls, and a great number of bracelets, laced about her little person.  One was forced to feel that the slightest article she wore cost more than all the wardrobe of a dozen girls like Nettie; her bonnet affected the simplicity that is beyond rubies.  Richness, that is the first quality about this old lady that I would like to convey to you, and the second was cleanliness.  You felt that old Mrs. Verrall was exquisitely clean.  If you had boiled my poor dear old mother in soda for a month you couldn’t have got her so clean as Mrs. Verrall constantly and manifestly was.  And pervading all her presence shone her third great quality, her manifest confidence in the respectful subordination of the world.

She was pale and a little out of breath that day, but without any loss of her ultimate confidence, and it was clear to me that she had come to interview Stuart upon the outbreak of passion that had bridged the gulf between their families.

And here again I find myself writing in an unknown language, so far as my younger readers are concerned.  You who know only the world that followed the Great Change will find much that I am telling inconceivable.  Upon these points I cannot appeal, as I have appealed for other confirmations, to the old newspapers; these were the things that no one wrote about because every one understood and every one had taken up an attitude.  There were in England and America, and indeed throughout the world, two great informal divisions of human beings—­the Secure and the Insecure.  There was not and never had been in either country a nobility—­it was and remains a common error that the British peers were noble—­neither in law nor custom were there noble families, and we altogether lacked the edification one found in Russia, for example, of a poor nobility.  A peerage was an hereditary possession that, like the family land, concerned only the eldest sons of the house; it radiated no luster of noblesse oblige.  The rest of the world were in law and