Her conversation with the editor of the Record proved so entertaining that she forgot all about the clipping until she had reached Fairview, and had satisfied a somewhat imperious appetite by a combination of lunch and afternoon tea.  Fairview was the “summer place” of Mr. Augustus P. Flint, her father, on a shelf of the hills in the town of Tunbridge, equidistant from Leith and Ripton:  and Mr. Flint was the president of the Imperial Railroad, no less.

Yes, he had once been plain Gus Flint, many years ago, when he used to fetch the pocket-handkerchiefs of Mr. Isaac D. Worthington of Brampton, and he was still “Gus” to his friends.  Mr. Flint’s had been the brain which had largely conceived and executed the consolidation of principalities of which the Imperial Railroad was the result and, as surely as tough metal prevails, Mr. Flint, after many other trials and errors of weaker stuff, had been elected to the place for which he was so supremely fitted.  We are so used in America to these tremendous rises that a paragraph will suffice to place Mr. Flint in his Aladdin’s palace.  To do him justice, he cared not a fig for the palace, and he would have been content with the farmhouse under the hill where his gardener lived.  You could not fool Mr. Flint on a horse or a farm, and he knew to a dot what a railroad was worth by travelling over it.  Like his governor-general and dependent, Mr. Hilary Vane, he had married a wife who had upset all his calculations.  The lady discovered Mr. Flint’s balance in the bank, and had proceeded to use it for her own glorification, and the irony of it all was that he could defend it from everybody else.  Mrs. Flint spent, and Mr. Flint paid the bills; for the first ten years protestingly, and after that he gave it up and let her go her own gait.

She had come from the town of Sharon, in another State, through which Mr. Flint’s railroad also ran, and she had been known as the Rose of that place.  She had begun to rise immediately, with the kite-like adaptability of the American woman for high altitudes, and the leaden weight of the husband at the end of the tail was as nothing to her.  She had begun it all by the study of people in hotels while Mr. Flint was closeted with officials and directors.  By dint of minute observation and reasoning powers and unflagging determination she passed rapidly through several strata, and had made a country place out of her husband’s farm in Tunbridge, so happily and conveniently situated near Leith.  In winter they lived on Fifth Avenue.

One daughter alone had halted, for a minute period, this progress, and this daughter was Victoria—­named by her mother.  Victoria was now twenty-one, and was not only of another generation, but might almost have been judged of another race than her parents.  The things for which her mother had striven she took for granted, and thought of them not at all, and she had by nature that simplicity and astonishing frankness of manner and speech which was once believed to be an exclusive privilege of duchesses.