The _famille_ Murdwell had traveled far in a very short time. Its rise had been one of the romances of scientific and social America. The genius of Murdwell _père_, to which the whole world was now paying tribute, had, among many other things, raised a palace on Fifth Avenue, acquired property on Long Island, and a villa in Italy. To these was now added an English country house “for the duration of the war.” This was the first appearance of the Murdwell ladies in the United Kingdom, and they were immensely interested in it. They had only been three months in the country and everything was new. Hitherto their knowledge of it had been based on the Englishman abroad, the reports of travelers, and the national output of fiction. As a consequence, they frankly owned that they had rather underrated it. So far they had been agreeably surprised to find it not altogether a one-horse affair. It is true they had arrived in the island at an exceptional time, but somehow it was more a going concern than they had been led to expect. For instance, when they were told that the local parson and his daughter were coming to dinner, they had good-humoredly resigned themselves to an evening of acute boredom. But one of the social peculiarities of England, as far as they had seen it at present, was that things are always just a bit better than you look for--the evening, when it came, was really so much more entertaining than a similar function would have been in Kentucky, which they took as the equivalent for Sussex. On sight, the meager, high-shouldered, rather frumpish, rather myopic Miss Thing, with the double-barreled name and the tortoise-shell spectacles, which she wore with effect, promised to be all that the lawless fancy of Bud and Jooly had painted her. But that was a first view. By the time dinner was over they had found things in common with her, and before the evening was out they were more inclined to sit at her feet than she was to sit at theirs. Their wonderful food and wine, their clothes and their surroundings, Bud’s pearls and Jooly’s diamonds, and their talk of Prince This and the Marquis So-and-So seemed to have not the slightest effect upon her. She took everything, Bud and Jooly included, so very much for granted, that their curiosity was piqued. Her dress was worth about a shilling a yard, her hair was done anyhow, her features did not conform to their idea of the beautiful, yet she was not in the least parochial, and both ladies agreed, that had you searched America from the east coast to the west it would have been hard to find anything quite like her. The vicar puzzled them even more. They were not able to range him at all. Perhaps the thing which impressed them most was “that he didn’t show his goods in the window.”