Her eyes wandered back to the landscape. It lay before her in the perfect beauty of a June evening: one of those evenings when twilight floats aloft in an air too pure to be penetrated by the density of darkness. What did it all mean, she wondered—that there should be this beauty, so ever-varying, so soul-sufficing, so complete, and face to face with it these people who one and all would gladly have exchanged it for any one of a hundred other things; her mother for money enough to carry them to the end of the year, her father for his New York club and a bridge table, Lorry of course for money too (money was always the burning question in the Spear family), and George Frenside for good talk in a Bohemian restaurant?

The girl herself shared, or at least understood, the hereditary antagonism toward Eaglewood of those who lived there. To the last two generations of Lorburns Eaglewood had embodied all the things they could not do because of it. The only member of the family who idealised it (and even he only theoretically) was Mr. Spear, who had "married into" it, and still faintly glowed with the refracted honour of speaking of "our little old place on the Hudson."

Old it was, for an American possession. Lorburns had lived there for considerably over two hundred years: the present house had been built in 1680. It was too long, perhaps, for Americans to live in any one place; and the worst of it was that, when they had, it became a sort of tribal obligation to go on doing so. Sell Eaglewood? Which one of them would have dared to? When Pittsburgh and Chicago fell upon the feudal Hudson, and one old property after another was bartered for a mess of pottage, the Lorburns sat apart with lifted brows, and grimly thanked Providence that Paul's Landing was too far from New York to attract the millionaires. Even now, had fashion climbed to their solitary height it is doubtful if any of them—not excepting Lorry—would have dared to mention aloud the places they could have gone to, and the things they could have done, if only they had been free of Eaglewood. As it happened, no such danger threatened, for fashion had passed them by; but had the peril been imminent, Mr. Spear would have opposed it with all the force of his eloquence.

Mr. Spear regarded Eaglewood with the veneration of the parvenu for a recently acquired ancestor. When he married the beautiful Miss Lorburn, New York said: "He's very clever, of course; but still, who would have expected to see a Spear at Eaglewood?" And he knew it, and was determined to show New York that a Spear could be perfectly at home even at that altitude.