A dress, whether it hung in slatternly folds around a washerwoman, or adorned the daughter of a duchess, was sacred in his eyes, and though in a certain way he had all the pride of the Schuylers and Rossiters combined, it was a pride which prompted him to treat every one kindly. His mother, who had been very fond of him, had done her best to make him understand that, as a Rossiter and Schuyler, it behooved him to demean himself like one worthy of so illustrious a line of ancestry; but Godfrey did not care for ancestry, nor blood, nor social distinctions, and played with every ragged boy in Hampstead, and sat for hours with old Peterkin the cobbler, and kept little Johnnie Mack at Schuyler Hill all day when his mother was out working, and the child would have been alone but for this thoughtfulness. Everybody knew Godfrey Schuyler, and everybody liked him, especially the middle and poorer classes, to whom he was as the brightness of the morning. An intolerable tease, Godfrey was something of a terror to his eldest sister Julia, whose imperious and sometimes insolent manners he mimicked and ridiculed, while to Alice Creighton of New York, who he knew had been selected for his wife, he was a perpetual source of joy and annoyance,—joy when he treated her with that tenderness and gentleness so natural to him in his intercourse with girls, and annoyance when even with his arm around her waist he mimicked her affected ways and her constant allusions to “when I was abroad.” In stature Godfrey was tall, with a graceful, willowy form, a bright, though rather dark complexion, soft, laughing blue eyes, with a world of mischief in them, and rich brown hair which clustered in curls about his forehead, and which he parted in the middle until his sister Julia, who did not like it, called him a prig and an ape, while Alice, who did like it, said it was “pretty, and just as the young noblemen wore their hair when she was abroad.” That was enough for Godfrey. If Alice Creighton liked it because she saw it abroad, he surely would not follow the fashion, and the next morning at breakfast his curly locks were parted on the side very near to his left ear, and a black ribbon bound two or three times around his head to keep his refractory hair in its place. “If ever he went abroad he hoped he should not make a fool of himself,” he said, and now that he was abroad, he bristled all over with nationality, and wore his country outside as plainly as if he had had placarded on his back, “I am an American, and proud of it, too.” Nothing was quite equal to New York in his estimation, and he was particularly averse to the rosy, healthy-looking girls whom he everywhere met, and in his first letters to his sisters and Alice he told them they were beauties compared with the English girls; “even if Alice’s nose was a pug and Jule’s forehead so low that it took a microscope to find it, and Em’s ankles no bigger than a pair of knitting-needles.”