“Thank you, dear--hanged witches. At any rate she was born at Salem. And her people removed to this very house more than forty years ago. The other day I was talking to old Judge Arkwright, and spoke of my mother-in-law as a Bostonian. ‘But,’ said he, ‘she’s not a Bostonian. She’s of Salem town.’ Think of it, Lord Frothingham! She’s lived here nearly half a century, and she married a man whose family has lived here two hundred years. And they still speak and think of her as a stranger. That’s Boston.” “It reminds me of home,” said Frothingham. “Very different from New York, isn’t it? I asked the woman I took in to dinner the other night where her parents came from. ‘Good Lord, don’t ask _me_!’ she said. ‘All I know about it is that they came in a hurry and never went back.’” “How sensible!” said Mrs. Ridgie, the more enthusiastically for her mother-in-law’s look of disgust. “You’ll notice that people on this side never talk of their ancestors unless there’s something wrong somewhere with themselves.” Mrs. Staunton restrained herself. “You’ll give Lord Frothingham a very false idea of this country, Virgie,” she said with softness in her voice and irritation in her eyes. “Oh, he’s certain to get that anyhow. He’ll only see one kind of people while he’s here, and though they think they’re the whole show they don’t amount to _that_.” At “that” she snapped her fingers so loudly and suddenly that both Mrs. Staunton and Frothingham started. “If you came really to know this country,” she went on, “you’d find out that just as soon as people here begin to pose as ‘our best people,’ ‘our best society,’ and all that rot, they begin to amount to nothing. They’re has-beens, or on the way to it. We don’t stand still here--not even in Boston. We’re always going up or coming down.” After a silence Mrs. Staunton ventured to say, “I think you’ll find, Lord Frothingham, that the tone of Boston is, as I told you, far higher than New York’s.” “Really!” Frothingham looked slightly alarmed. “That’s bad news,” he said. “I don’t go in for a very high tone, you know. I’m keyed rather low, I should say.” “You needn’t be frightened,” said Mrs. Ridgie. “They beat the air a good deal here. But, if you’ll be patient and not encourage ’em, they’ll soon get down to the good old business of ravelling reputations. At that they’re far superior to New York.”