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