to Mariposa to see him and he had all he could do to head
them off from it.

Why? Why stop them? The reason was, simple enough, that Pupkin was
ashamed of them, bitterly ashamed. The picture of his mother and father
turning up in Mariposa and being seen by his friends there and going up
to the Pepperleigh's house made him feel faint with shame.

No, I don't say it wasn't wrong. It only shows what difference of
fortune, the difference of being rich and being poor, means in this
world. You perhaps have been so lucky that you cannot appreciate what
it means to feel shame at the station of your own father and mother. You
think it doesn't matter, that honesty and kindliness of heart are all
that counts. That only shows that you have never known some of the
bitterest feelings of people less fortunate than yourself.

So it was with Mr. Pupkin. When he thought of his father and mother
turning up in Mariposa, his face reddened with unworthy shame.

He could just picture the scene! He could see them getting out of their
Limousine touring car, with the chauffeur holding open the door for
them, and his father asking for a suite of rooms,--just think of it, a
suite of rooms!--at the Mariposa House.

The very thought of it turned him ill.

What! You have mistaken my meaning? Ashamed of them because they were
poor? Good heavens, no, but because they were rich! And not rich in the
sense in which they use the term in Mariposa, where a rich person merely
means a man who has money enough to build a house with a piazza and to
have everything he wants; but rich in the other sense,--motor cars, Ritz
hotels, steam yachts, summer islands and all that sort of thing.

Why, Pupkin's father,--what's the use of trying to conceal it any
longer?--was the senior partner in the law firm of Pupkin, Pupkin and
Pupkin. If you know the Maritime Provinces at all, you've heard of the
Pupkins. The name is a household word from Chedabucto to Chidabecto.
And, for the matter of that, the law firm and the fact that Pupkin
senior had been an Attorney General was the least part of it. Attorney
General! Why, there's no money in that! It's no better than the Senate.
No, no, Pupkin senior, like so many lawyers, was practically a promoter,
and he blew companies like bubbles, and when he wasn't in the Maritime
Provinces he was in Boston and New York raising money and floating
loans, and when they had no money left in New York he floated it in
London: and when he