world. Mrs. Lenox had long since resigned expectation
for herself, but she was not yet too hopeless to indulge in passionate
belief of a brilliant future for her daughter; and when I used to
listen to the gorgeous day-dreams of the two, I felt dejectedly that my
own most radiant visions were by comparison the offspring of a lifeless
and gloomy fancy. There was nothing problematical or idealistic in their
ideas of a happy destiny. What they wanted was, in the first place,
money; in the second place, money; thirdly and finally, money. I doubt
whether Mrs. Lenox ever resigned herself to the sway of fiction or
poetry, but I am sure that had she studied Shakespeare she would have
thought Iago's advice to Roderigo shrewdly comprised the worth of all
aspiration. She and Georgy longed for dress, jewels and laces; great
houses panelled with mirrors and carpeted with velvet; magnificence and
pomp and circumstance about their every-day life; horses, carriages,
invitations, theatres, operas,--all the pleasures which throng toward
people with lined pockets and idle lives. Their wants were innumerable,
their taste and fancy a harp of a thousand strings upon which caprice
and vanity could play an endless variety of tunes. Mrs. Lenox had once
enjoyed the luxuries she still coveted so ardently, yet Georgy, who had
never known wealth, or even the easy-assured comforts of life, had
instinctively the keener perception of the two for the worth of costly
surroundings and possessions. No princess who had breathed perfumes all
her life, trod on velvet and been served on gold and silver, could have
felt a more vital necessity for luxury than Georgy, who had always lived
among shabby things and known few but shabby people. She was born with
the looks, manners and tastes of what we call an aristocrat, and her
mother worshipped these traits in her. When one day she flung away her
dinner because it was not to her liking, and went out of doors and
pulled the peaches ripening against the wall, and ate them instead, Mrs.
Lenox felt that such fastidiousness foreshadowed a destiny more than
common. For her to tear her hats to pieces and cut her dress or apron in
shreds because they did not suit her was a frequent caprice, and one we
had all laughed at again and again--except Jack, who was thrifty by
nature and respected the worth of things like a sensible economist. It
was generally he, however, who replaced the ruined garments, and by the
time he was six