e old names he sneered at. And in her words
he savoured a certain old-time flavour of primness and pride--a vaguely
delicate hint of resentment, which it amused him to excite. Pacing the
dunes with her waist enlaced, he said, to incite retort:

"The old families are done for. Decadent in morals, in physique, mean
mentally and spiritually, they are even worse off than respectfully
cherished ruins, because they are out of fashion; they and their dingy
dwellings. Our house is on the market; I'd be glad to see it sold only
Tressilvain will get half."

"In you," she said, "there seems to be other things, besides reverence,
which are out of fashion."

He continued, smilingly: "As the old mansions disappear, Virginia, so
disintegrate those families whose ancestors gave names to the old lanes
of New Amsterdam. I reverence neither the one nor the other. Good
riddance! The fit alone survive."

"I still survive, if you please."

"Proving the rule, dear. But, yourself excepted, look at the few of us
who chance to be here in the South. Look at Courtlandt Classon,
intellectually destitute! Cuyp, a mental brother to the ox; and Vetchen
to the ass; and Mrs. Van Dieman to somebody's maidservant--that old
harridan with all the patrician distinction of a Dame des Halles--"

"Please, Louis!"

"Dear, I am right. Even Constance Palliser, still physically superb, but
mentally morbid--in love with what once was Wayward--with the ghost she
raised in her dead girlhood, there on the edge of yesterday--"

"Louis! Louis! And _you_! What were you yesterday? What are you
to-day?"

"What do I care what I was and am?--Dutch, British, burgher, or
cavalier?--What the deuce do I care, my dear? The Malcourts are rotten;
everybody knows it. Tressilvain is worse; my sister says so. As I told
you, the old families are done for--all except yours--"

"I am the last of mine, Louis."

"The last and best--"

"Are you laughing?"

"No; you are the only human one I've ever heard of among your race--the
sweetest, soundest, best--"

"I?... What you say is too terrible to laugh at. I--guilty in
mind--unsound--contaminated--"

"Temporarily. I'm going to-night. Time and absence are the great
antiseptics. When the corrupt cause disappears the effect follows. Cheer
up, dear; I take the night train."

But she only pressed her pale face closer to his shoulder. Their
interlocked shadows, huge, fantastic, streamed across the eastern dunes
as they moved slo