He contrasted her with the setting in which he found her--a distinctly masculine setting. The hall was enormous, rough and simple; skins on the floor, rather wooden portraits of dead Kildares on the wall, together with antlers and fox-brushes, and the stuffed head of the horse running his race with Death. The huge fireplace of field-boulders might have roasted oxen in its time. There were some modern comforts; a piano, many books, a table heaped with periodicals; even that indispensable adjunct of American homes, the graphophone; but no curtains, nor cushions, nor draperies, none of the little touches that speak of feminine habitation. In twenty years, Kate had made few changes in the house; she regarded Basil Kildare's home as merely a temporary abode until Jacques came to claim her and her children. "I'm in luck!" thought the collector of impressions. "This is the setting for my new novel." Here was the Kentucky, the America, he had hitherto sought in vain, with its suggestion of the backwoods of civilization, the pioneer, the primitive. And to emphasize and give the suggestion point, here was an example of the finest feminine beauty left to this degenerating world, beauty such as the Greeks knew, large-limbed, deep-bosomed, clear-eyed, product of a vigorous past, full of splendid augury for the future. "What sons the woman must have!" he mused, stirred; and then remembered, with quite a sense of personal injury, that there were no sons. He looked again with new interest at the daughter: but she disappointed him. She was too dainty, too petite, with a pink-and-white Dresden prettiness that was almost insignificant. (He missed, as people often did, the shrewd gray gleam behind those infantile lashes.) He hoped that the second daughter might prove truer to type. Jacqueline, meanwhile, had made an unobtrusive appearance through a door just behind Professor Thorpe, and manifested her presence by a pinch on his arm. He said "Ouch!" and dropped his eye-glass. "Hush!" she admonished him, replacing it on his nose in motherly fashion. "I want to look them over and choose a victim before they see me. Why, you old duck of a godparent! Four of them--and all so young and beautiful. Two apiece. I hope they can dance?" "Warranted to give perfect satisfaction in the ballroom, or money returned," he murmured. "But they aren't professors, my dear. None of ours seemed young and beautiful enough for your purposes." She gave his arm an ecstatic squeeze. "I knew it! I simply knew the one in gray, with the haughty nose, couldn't be a professor." "He's worse," warned Thorpe. "He's an author." She gave a little squeal. "An author! But where did you get him, Goddy?" (Such was her rather irreverent abbreviation of "godfather," employed to signify especial approbation.) "I didn't. He got me. It is my famous nephew from Boston--'from Boston and Paris,' I believe he subscribes himself."