"Now my dear Mr. Beason," she laughed finally, "don't be so hard on us. My mother and Dr. Hubers' mother were sisters, but please don't rub it in so unmercifully that poor mother has been altogether distanced in the matter of offspring. You see mother married an Irish politician--hence me. While Aunt Katherine--Karl's mother--married a German scholar--therefore Karl. And the German scholar was the son of a German professor. In fact, from all I have been led to believe the Hubers were busily engaged in the professoring business at the time Julius Caesar stalked up from Italy." "Now Georgia," hastened Mrs. McCormick earnestly, "this newspaper work gives you such a tendency to exaggerate. I never heard it said before that the family went _that_ far back." "Perhaps not. But just because a thing has never been said before, isn't there all the more reason for saying it now? And I'm just trying to make Mr. Beason understand"--demurely--"why some people are scholars and others are not." But Season's mind was working straight from the shoulder. "Does he ever come here?" he demanded. "Yes, indeed; he honours our poor board quite often with the light of his countenance." Beason accepted that as unextravagant statement of fact. "Well, do you--know about him?" he asked, bluntly. "That he's 'way up? Oh, my, yes. And we're tremendously proud of him." "I should think you would be," said Beason, rather grimly. "Karl is indeed remarkable," said Mrs. McCormick, blandly expansive, well pleased with both Karl and her own appreciation of him. "I feel that our family has much to be proud of, to think both he and Georgia have done so well with their work." The expression of Beason's face was a study. Georgia laughed over it for weeks afterwards. "Now my chief interest," said Wyman, who was at the stage where he put life in capital letters, and cherished harmless ideas about his own deep understanding of the human heart, "is in Mrs. Hubers. There, I fancy,"--it was his capital letter voice--"is a woman who understands." "A dandy girl," said Georgia, briskly. "She has the artistic temperament?" he pursued. "Oh, not disagreeably so," she retorted. "You see," turning to Beason, who was plainly impatient at this shifting to anything so irrelevant as a wife, "I play quite a leading part in Dr. Hubers' life. I'm his cousin--that's the accident of birth; but I handed over to him his wife, for which he owes me undying gratitude. I'm looking for something really splendid from Europe." "I wish I hadn't gone home so early that spring," sighed Wyman. "I'd like to have seen that little affair. It must have been the real thing in romance." "But it was nothing of the sort! It was the most disgraceful thing I ever had anything to do with." "Now Georgia," protested her mother, "you know you are so apt to be misunderstood."