“Good Lord! How old were you?”
“Fifteen.”
“Liberty at fifteen! All right. Go on.”
“I won’t if you are going to laugh at me.”
“Go on,” he insisted, flashing a disrupting look at her.
V
“Well, it all goes back to the fact that I happened to be born among my relatives.”
“Most things seem to go back to that.”
“Yes, don’t they? And you see, they could never account for me any more than I could account for them, and the trouble was that they were always trying to account for me, while I had the sense to accept them for what they were. You know the kind of thing my family is.”
“Let’s see. Coronetted stationary, the younger son end of it, a name that goes back to property in the Doomsday Book, women who read The Queen and know every ramification of the Royal Family.”
She laughed delightedly. “That’s exactly it. And they were probably a nice harmless lot in England, but something happened to them on the voyage out. They were gods when they got here, and as gods they set themselves up. There were an awful lot of them all under the Elegancies, my mother’s parents, you know. She was one of seven, and then there were the aunts and some old cousins, quite a party. And the Elegancies ruled them all. They were beautiful old pictures, I grant you that.
“Well, you know, they ran Auckland society. They gave two balls every winter that decided who was ‘in’ and who was ‘out.’ They entertained the Governors. They were old personal friends of Sir George Grey. And nobody ever questioned their right to rule like that—till I
