“Kathie . . . how horrible! Why, it makes me think of veiled people in heathenish countries.”

“Quite so, and a merry little gamble it is. But see the thrill of it! Is he going to be dark, light, short, tall, a keen looker, or a crock . . . interesting or a prune? Will he glide up in a high-powered machine or rattle up in an egg-beater?”

“Kathie!”

“If Jimmie were going to be there I wouldn’t have made the date. But Jimmie’s not going to be there . . . and a poor girl has to have somebody to love her.”

“Kathie,” Abbie looked at her granddaughter as at some queer museum specimen, “do you know, you just make me wonder whatever your great-great-grandmother would have thought of you. Isabelle Anders-Mackenzie, her name was. She was gentle and refined,—very lovely and very aristocratic. She lived on the beautiful Mackenzie estates . . .”

“Stop . . . stop right there!” Katherine sat up, alert as a young deer with uplifted head. “For heaven’s sake, why has no one ever told me that before? Why, our sorority is just keen about family. That’s our line. I’ve been sort of uncertain about the past . . . a little shy in mentioning some of our aunty-cedents and uncle-cedents . . . not ashamed of anybody, y’unn’erstan’, but just supposing they were all this same kind, . . . out-of-the-soil-up-to-God.”

“Kathie!”

“And all the time I had this keen ancestor. Now, say it again, and very slowly . . . ‘Katherine, your great-great-grandmother was Isabelle Anders-Mackenzie, a beautiful, aristocratic snob. She was an awful snob, wasn’t she, Granny?”

“Kathie!”

“Think how my marriage could read: ‘The marriage of Miss Katherine Elaine Deal to Mr. James Worden Buchanan . . .’ I haven’t said anything about this yet to Jimmie, but as the Chinaman says, ‘Can happen,’ and there’s nothing like taking time by the fetlock. Picture this in bold bad type in the Sunday edition: ‘Miss Deal is a direct descendant of the Anders-Mackenzies of Aberdeen, Scotland, Knights of the Garters’ . . .”

Abbie Deal’s old eyes twinkled. “But don’t forget the other side of the house, too, Kathie. There were knights of the suspenders, too. Don’t forget old Grandmother Bridget O’Conner, Kathie. She was an Irish peasant woman and she lived in a shack at the side of a hill on the edge of the moors. The chickens and the pigs ran in and out of the thatch-covered hut. She couldn’t read a word and she couldn’t write her name, and she smoked a black pipe. But if it wasn’t for the sturdy plebeian blood of her daughter, Maggie (my mother, Kathie) you wouldn’t be here.”

Katherine waved it aside. “We’ll pass lightly over the O’Conners. It’s the Mackenzies that intrigue me. What more do you know about them?”

Abbie Deal told all that she could remember hearing from her sister Belle,—the story of the lovely lady,—of her reddish-brown hair and tapering fingers, and of the picture that hung on the landing of the stairway in the great hall.