And what a flood of anecdotes it let loose!  A flood that bore us straight back to Castleman Hall, and to all the scenes of her young ladyhood!  If only Lady Dee could have revised this book of Veblen’s, how many points she could have given to him!  No details had been too minute for the technique of Sylvia’s great-aunt—­the difference between the swish of the right kind of silk petticoats and the wrong kind; and yet her technique had been broad enough to take in a landscape.  “Every girl should have a background,” had been one of her maxims, and Sylvia had to have a special phaeton to drive, a special horse to ride, special roses which no one else was allowed to wear.

“Conspicuous expenditure of time,” wrote Veblen.  It was curious, said Sylvia, but nobody was free from this kind of vanity.  There was dear old Uncle Basil, a more godly bishop never lived, and yet he had a foible for carving!  In his opinion the one certain test of a gentleman was the ease with which he found the joints of all kinds of meat, and he was in arms against the modern tendency to turn such accomplishments over to butlers.  He would hold forth on the subject, illustrating his theories with an elegant knife, and Sylvia remembered how her father and the Chilton boys had wired up the joints of a duck for the bishop to work on.  In the struggle the bishop had preserved his dignity, but lost the duck, and the bishop’s wife, being also high-born, and with a long line of traditions behind her, had calmly continued the conversation, while the butler removed the smoking duck from her lap!

Such was the way of things at Castleman Hall!  The wild, care-free people—­like half-grown children, romping their way through life!  There was really nothing too crazy for them to do, if the whim struck them.  Once a visiting cousin had ventured the remark that she saw no reason why people should not eat rats; a barn-rat was clean in its person, and far choicer in its food than a pig.  Thereupon “Miss Margaret” had secretly ordered the yard-man to secure a barn-rat; she had had it broiled, and served in a dish of squirrels, and had sat by and watched the young lady enjoy it!  And this, mind you, was Mrs. Castleman of Castleman Hall, mother of five children, and as stately a dame as ever led the grand march at the Governor’s inaugural ball!  “Major Castleman,” she would say to her husband, “you may take me into my bedroom, and when you have locked the door securely, you may spit upon me, if you wish; but don’t you dare even to imagine anything undignified about me in public!”

15.  In course of time Sylvia and I became very good friends.  Proud as she was, she was lonely, and in need of some one to open her eager mind to.  Who was there safer to trust than this plain Western woman, who lived so far, both in reality and in ideas, from the great world of fashion?

Before we parted she considered it necessary to mention my relationship to this world.  She had a most acute social conscience.  She knew exactly what formalities she owed to everyone, just when she ought to call, and how long she ought to stay, and what she ought to ask the other person to do in return; she assumed that the other knew it all exactly as well, and would suffer if she failed in the slightest degree.