This brother and sister had come to New York fifteen years before, when he was twenty-two and she nineteen.  They were from Albany, where their family had possessed some wealth and much social position for many generations.  There was the usual “queer streak” in the Norman family—­an intermittent but fixed habit of some one of them making a “low marriage.”  One view of this aberration might have been that there was in the Norman blood a tenacious instinct of sturdy and self-respecting independence that caused a Norman occasionally to do as he pleased instead of as he conventionally ought.  Each time the thing occurred there was a mighty and horrified hubbub throughout the connection.  But in the broad, as the custom is, the Normans were complacent about the “queer streak.”  They thought it kept the family from rotting out and running to seed.  “Nothing like an occasional infusion of common blood,” Aunt Ursula Van Bruyten (born Norman) used to say.  For her Norman’s sister was named.

Norman’s father had developed the “queer streak.”  Their mother was the daughter of a small farmer and, when she met their father, was chambermaid in a Troy hotel, Troy then being a largish village.  As soon as she found herself married and in a position with whose duties she was unfamiliar, she set about fitting herself for them with the same diligence and thoroughness which she had shown in learning chamber work in a village hotel.  She educated herself, selected not without shrewdness and carefully put on an assortment of genteel airs, finally contrived to make a most creditable appearance—­was more aristocratic in tastes and in talk than the high mightiest of her relatives by marriage.  But her son Fred was a Pinkey in character.  In boyhood he was noted for his rough and low associates.  His bosom friends were the son of a Jewish junk dealer, the son of a colored wash-woman, and the son of an Irish day laborer.  Also, the commonness persisted as he grew up.  Instead of seeking aristocratic ease, he aspired to a career.  He had choice of several rich and well-born girls; but he developed a strong distaste for marriage of any sort and especially for a rich marriage.  A fortune he was resolved to have, but it should be one that belonged to him.  When he was about ready to enter a law office, his father and mother died leaving less than ten thousand dollars in all for his sister and himself.  His sister hesitated, half inclined to marry a stupid second cousin who had thirty thousand a year.

“Don’t do it, Ursula,” Fred advised.  “If you must sell out, sell for something worth while.”  He laughed in his frank, ironical way.  “Fact is, we’ve both made up our minds to sell.  Let’s go to the best market—­New York.  If you don’t like it, you can come back and marry that fat-wit any time you please.”