The Trumpeter Swan

e Bannister had been the firs

ouses on the great estates had been thrown open for the county famili

had once packed great hampers with delicious foods, and who had feasted under the trees amid all the loveliness of mellow-tinted hills, now ordered by telephone a luncheon of cut-and-dried courses, and motored down to e

bred in the bone of Old Dominion men. He swore by all the gods that when he

by unprofitable acres. The remaining two months of her vacation were given to her mother's father, Admiral Meredith, whose fortune had come down to him from whale-hunting ancestors. The

tarian of Quaker stock, Judge Bannister was High Church, and it was his wife's Presbyterianism which had been handed down to Becky. Religion had therefore nothing to do w

g of men, she knew nothing indeed of life. The world was to her an open

Horse Show, "thinks I am going to eat dabs of things at the

the Judge's household only Mandy, the cook, and Calvin, her husband. Mandy sat up half the night to bake a cake, and Calvin kille

picturesque customs of the South. His own estate that had once been sold by John Randolph to Thomas Jefferson for a bowl of arrack punch--! Old times, old manners! The Judge drank his coffee with the air

d a democrat by assumption, he drove his bays proudly. Calv

Aunt Claudia had not forgotten that she had been a belle in Richmond. She was a stately little woman with a firm conviction of the necessity of maintaining dignified sta

world," she often told Becky, "if we

her ingloriously. She wore the stubbed russet shoes, a not to

change your shoes," Aunt Claudia tol

and the dogs. It was h

is heavenly, what will you ca

heep grazed on the hillside or lay at rest in the shade. The bells of the leaders tinkled faintly, the ewes and the lambs were calling. Beyond the b

shoes would have been a pitiful contrast if she had cared in the least what the people on the porch thought of her. B

. When he saw Becky he leaned

, as the surrey moved on, "the o

s had not called, but he was not yet aware of his social isolation. He was rich, and most of the county families were poor-from his point of view the odds were in his favor-and it w

t the old man is Judge Bannister. He's one o

. Oscar was fooled, you see, by the Judge's old-fashioned clothes, and the high surrey, and the horses with the flowing tails. His ideas of life had to do with motor cars