There was society in Willowfield, society which had taken up its abiding-place in three or four streets and confined itself to developing its importance in half a dozen families--old families. They were always spoken of as the "old families," and, to be a member of one of them, even a second or third cousin of weak mind and feeble understanding, was to be enclosed within the magic circle outside of which was darkness, wailing, and gnashing of teeth. There were the Stornaways, who had owned the button factory for nearly a generation and a half--which was a long time; the Downings, who had kept the feed-store for quite thirty years, and the Burtons, who had been doctors for almost as long, not to mention the Larkins, who had actually founded the Willowfield _Times_, and kept it going, which had scarcely been expected of them at the outset. Their moral, mental, and social gifts notwithstanding, there was nothing connected with the Stornaways, the Downings, the Burtons, and the Larkins of such importance as their antiquity. The uninformed outsider, on hearing it descanted upon, might naturally have been betrayed into the momentary weakness of expecting to see Mr. Downing moulder away, and little old Doctor Burton crumble into dust. "They belong," it was said, with the temperateness of true dignity, "to our old families, and that is something, you know, even in America." "It has struck me," an observing male visitor once remarked, "that there are a good many women in Willowfield, and that altogether it has a feminine tone."