's
friend, Prof. Abelard Samothrace, of Columbia University, probably would
have admitted that just as the two had lived in the same house--albeit
at different levels--on Fifth Avenue, so their forebears at some
prehistoric period had, likely as not, occupied the same cave and had in
company waded on frosty mornings the ice-skimmed swamps of Mittel Europa
in pursuit of the cave bear, the mastodon and the woolly rhinoceros, and
for afternoon relaxation had made up twosomes for hunting wives with
stone clubs instead of mashies in their hairy prehensile hands.

It would seem, therefore, that--whatever of tradition might have
originated in the epoch in question--glimmerings of sportsmanship, of
personal pride, of tribal duty or of conscience ought to have been the
common heritage of them both. For it was assuredly true that while Miss
Katie's historic ancestors had been Celtiberians, clad on occasion only
in a thin coating of blue paint, Miss Althea's had dwelt in the dank
marshes of the Elbe and had been unmistakably Teutonic, though this
curse had been largely removed by racial intermarriage during subsequent
thousands of years. Indeed, it may well have been that in the dimmer
past some Beekman serf on bended knee had handed a gilded harp to some
King O'Connell on his throne. If the O'Connells were foreigners the
Beekmans, from the point of view of the aboriginal American, were no
less so simply because they had preceded them by a couple of hundred
years.

Tradition is not a matter of centuries but of ages. If Katie inherited
some of hers from the peat bogs adjacent to Tara's Halls in that remote
period when there were still snakes in Ireland, Miss Althea had
vicariously acquired others from the fur-clad barbarians described by
Tacitus who spent their leisure time in drinking, gambling or splitting
each other's skulls with stone mallets. On this subject see Spencer's
"Data of Ethics" and Lecky's "History of European Morals." But all this
entirely escaped Miss Althea, who suffered from the erroneous impression
that because she was a Beekman and lived in a stone mansion facing
Central Park she differed fundamentally not only from the O'Connells but
from the Smiths, the Pasquales, the Ivanovitches and the Ginsbergs, all
of whom really come of very old families. Upon this supposed difference
she prided herself.

Because she was, in fact, mistaken and because the O'Connells shared
with the Beekmans and the Ginsbergs a tradi