wealth.  But the Severances were not rich.  They had about the same amount of money that old Lucius Quintus had left; but, just as the neighborhood seemed to have degenerated when in fact it had remained all but unchanged, so the Severence fortune seemed to have declined, altogether through changes of standard elsewhere.  The Severances were no poorer; simply, other people of their class had grown richer, enormously richer.  The Severence homestead, taken by itself and apart from its accidental setting of luxurious grounds, was a third-rate American dwelling-house, fine for a small town, but plain for a city.  And the Severence fortune by contrast with the fortunes so lavishly displayed in the fashionable quarter of the capital, was a meager affair, just enough for comfort; it was far too small for the new style of wholesale entertainment which the plutocracy has introduced from England, where the lunacy for aimless and extravagant display rages and ravages in its full horror of witless vulgarity.  Thus, the Severences from being leaders twenty years before, had shrunk into “quiet people,” were saved from downright obscurity and social neglect only by the indomitable will and tireless energy of old Cornelia Bowker.

Cornelia Bowker was not a Severence; in fact she was by birth indisputably a nobody.  Her maiden name was Lard, and the Lards were “poor white trash.”  By one of those queer freaks wherewith nature loves to make mockery of the struttings of men, she was endowed with ambition and with the intelligence and will to make it effective.  Her first ambition was education; by performing labors and sacrifices incredible, she got herself a thorough education.  Her next ambition was to be rich; without the beauty that appeals to the senses, she married herself to a rich New Englander, Henry Bowker.  Her final and fiercest ambition was social power.  She married her daughter to the only son and namesake of Lucius Quintus Severence.  The pretensions of aristocracy would soon collapse under the feeble hands of born aristocrats were it not for two things—­the passion of the masses of mankind for looking up, and the frequent infusions into aristocratic veins of vigorous common blood.  Cornelia Bowker, born Lard, adored “birth.”  In fulfilling her third ambition she had herself born again.  From the moment of the announcement of her daughter’s engagement to Lucius Severence, she ceased to be Lard or Bowker and became Severence, more of a Severence than any of the veritable Severences.  Soon after her son-in-law and his father died, she became so much the Severence that fashionable people forgot her origin, regarded her as the true embodiment of the pride and rank of Severence—­and Severence became, thanks wholly to her, a synonym for pride and rank, though really the Severences were not especially blue-blooded.