nd friendly, as eager for the
laughter of life as any healthy young woman should be, but she gave the
young men kindly counsel when they became insistent or boresome, and
sent them away.

Shelbyville was founded by Kentuckians; some of the old State's best
families were represented there. A person's pedigree was his credentials
in the society of the slumbering little town, nestled away among the
blue hills of Missouri. It did not matter so much about one's past, for
blood will have its vagaries and outflingings of youthful spirit; and
even less what the future promised, just so there was blood to vouch for
him at the present.

Blood had not done a great deal for Shelbyville, no matter what its
excellencies in social and political life. The old town stood just about
as it was finished, sixty years and more before that time. Upstart
cities had sprung up not far away, throwing Shelbyville into hopeless
shadow. The entire energies of its pioneers seemed to have been expended
in its foundation, leaving them too much exhausted to transmit any of
their former fire and strength to their sons. It followed that the sons
of Shelbyville were not what their fathers had been.

Of course, there were exceptions where one of them rose once in a while
and made a streak across the state or national firmament. Some of them
were eminent in the grave professions; most of them were conductors of
street cars in Kansas City, the nearest metropolis. There was not room
in Shelbyville for all its sons to establish themselves at law, even if
they had all been equipped, and if a man could not be a lawyer or a
college professor, what was open to him, indeed, but conducting a
street-car? That was a placid life.

It is remarkable how Kentuckians can maintain the breed of their horses
through many generations, but so frequently fall short in the standard
of their sons. Kentuckians are only an instance. The same might be said
of kings.

Not understanding her exactions in the matter, nor her broader
requirements, Shelbyville could not make out why Alice Price remained
unmated. She was almost twenty, they said, which was coming very close
to the age-limit in Shelbyville. It was nothing unusual for girls to
marry there at seventeen, and become grandmothers at thirty-seven.

If she wanted better blood than she could find in Shelbyville, the old
gentlemen said, twisting their white old heads in argumentative
finality, she'd have to go to the nobility o