Mrs. Minity had come to the Riviera thirty years before, after an attack of bronchitis, and finding the climate milder and the life easier than in Brooklyn, had not gone back. Mrs. Clephane never knew what roots she had broken in the upheaval, for everything immediately surrounding her assumed such colossal proportions that remoter facts, even concerning herself, soon faded to the vanishing-point. Only now and then, when a niece from Bridgeport sent her a bottle of brandy-peaches, or a nephew from Brooklyn wrote to say that her income had been reduced by the foreclosure of a mortgage, did the family emerge from its transatlantic mists, and Mrs. Minity become, for a moment, gratified or irate at the intrusion. But such emotions, at their acutest, were but faint shadows of those aroused by the absence of her foot-warmer, or the Salvation Army’s having called twice in the same month for her subscription, or one of the horses having a stiff shoulder, and being replaced, for a long hazardous week, by another, known to the same stable for twenty years, and whom the _patron_ himself undertook to drive, so that Mrs. Minity should not miss her airing. She _had_ thought of staying in till her _own_ horse recovered; but the doctor had absolutely forbidden it, so she had taken her courage in both hands, and gone out with the substitute, who was not even of the same colour as the horse she was used to. “But I took valerian every night,” she added, “and doubled my digitalis.” Kate Clephane, as she listened (for the hundredth time), remembered that she had once thought Mrs. Minity a rather impressive old lady, somewhat arrogant and very prosy, but with a distinct “atmosphere,” and a charming half-obsolete vocabulary, suggesting “Signers” and Colonial generals, which was a refreshing change from the over-refinement of Mrs. Merriman and the Betterlys’ monotonous slang. Now, compared to certain long-vanished figures of the Clephane background--compared even to the hated figure of old Mrs. Clephane--Mrs. Minity shrank to the semblance of a vulgar fussy old woman. “Old Mrs. Clephane never bragged, whatever she did,” Kate thought: “how ridiculous all that fuss about driving behind a strange horse would have seemed to her. After all, good breeding, even in the odious, implies a certain courage....” Her mother-in-law, as she mused, assumed the commanding yet not unamiable shape of a Roman matron of heroic mould, a kind of “It-hurts-not-O-my-Pætus,” falling first upon the sword.