In his household there were three persons, and sixteen servants to wait upon them. His sister--she and her husband, Clayton Fitzhugh, were the other two persons--his sister was always complaining that there were not enough servants, and Frederick, the most indulgent of brothers, was always letting her add to the number. It seemed to him that the more help there was, the less smoothly the household ran. But that did not concern him; his mind was saved for more important matters. There was no reason why it should concern him; could he not compel the dollars to flood in faster than she could bail them out? This brother and sister had come to New York fifteen years before, when he was twenty-two and she nineteen. They were from Albany, where their family had possessed some wealth and much social position for many generations. There was the usual "queer streak" in the Norman family--an intermittent but fixed habit of some one of them making a "low marriage." One view of this aberration might have been that there was in the Norman blood a tenacious instinct of sturdy and self-respecting independence that caused a Norman occasionally to do as he pleased instead of as he conventionally ought. Each time the thing occurred there was a mighty and horrified hubbub throughout the connection. But in the broad, as the custom is, the Normans were complacent about the "queer streak." They thought it kept the family from rotting out and running to seed. "Nothing like an occasional infusion of common blood," Aunt Ursula Van Bruyten (born Norman) used to say. For her Norman's sister was named.