We do not make the acquaintance of the great Mel, but his spirit haunts the scenes of his turbulent career, and we learn of him through fabulous reports and a family of handsome and distinguished daughters, and one son, Evan. All inherit their father’s physical and natural superiority. They pass, as to the manner born, into the upper sphere, and comport themselves in that select circle with dignity and ease. Behind them in the town of Lymport the tailor’s shop, with the name of Harrington upon the door, exists, carried on by the great man’s widow as a means of liquidating his debts. It is the successes and disturbances, the intrigues and exposure of this superior family--born for greatness but not to it--that the book records; and never was genius more untiringly and extravagantly used than in the combined efforts of these three lovely ladies and their brother to conceal the family origin and pass for people of blood. The partial success that crowns their efforts is but an inadequate return for such an expenditure of brain in well-conceived and audacious contrivances. People born with a soul above buttons cannot be blamed for every laudable effort to find their way into their natural element! Imagine a single rose-bush bearing flowers of exceptional beauty in a cabbage-garden, and you will have the incongruous effect of the tailor’s daughter, the Countess de Saldar, in a middle-class drawing-room. Grand manners and aristocratic habits were hers, not by right of breeding or blood, but simply by right of nature. So we sympathize with her in all her graceful and unapproachable intriguing to maintain herself in a society to which she had won entrance by her own unaided genius.