If Kate's ancestors had wasted any part of their substance in too lavish a hospitality, after the manner of the spendthrift whose extravagances were recounted in the preceding chapter, there was nothing to indicate it in the home of their descendants. No loose shutters, crumbling chimneys, or blistered woodwork defaced the Seymour mansion:--the touch of the restorer was too apparent. No sooner did a shutter sag or a hinge give way than away it went to the carpenter or the blacksmith; no sooner did a banister wabble, or a table crack, or an andiron lose a leg, than up came somebody with a kit, or a bag, or a box of tools, and they were as good as new before you could wink your eye. Indeed, so great was the desire to keep things up that it was only necessary (so a wag said) to scratch a match on old Seymour's front door to have its panels repainted the next morning. And then its seclusion:--while its neighbors--the Temple mansion among them--had been placed boldly out to the full building line where they could see and be seen, the Seymours, with that spirit of aloofness which had marked the family for generations, had set their dwelling back ten paces, thrown up a hedge of sweet-smelling box to screen the inmates from the gaze of passers-by, planted three or four big trees as protection for the upper windows, and, to insure still greater privacy, had put up a swinging wooden gate, kept shut by a ball and chain, its clang announcing the entrance of each and every visitor. And this same spirit was manifest the moment you stepped into the wide hall, glanced at the old family portraits marching steadily, one after another, up the side of the spacious stairs (revarnished every other year)--entered the great drawing-room hung with yellow satin and decorated with quaint mirrors, and took a scat in one of the all-embracing arm-chairs, there to await the arrival of either the master of the house or his charming daughter. If it were the master to whom you wished to pay your respects, one glance at the Honorable Howard Douglass Seymour would have convinced you that he was precisely the kind of man who should have had charge of so well-ordered a home: so well brushed was he--so clean-shaven--so immaculately upholstered--the two points of his collar pinching his cheeks at the same precise angle; his faultless black stock fitting to perfection, the lapels of his high-rolled coat matching exactly. And then the correct parting of the thin gray hair and the two little gray brush-tails of lovelocks that were combed in front of his ears, there to become a part of the two little dabs of gray whiskers that stretched from his temples to his bleached cheekbones. Yes--a most carefully preserved, prim, and well-ordered person was Kate's father.