Not that Mrs. Payton--telling him, with endless illustrations, just how "impossible" her Freddy was--looked in the least like a monkey; she was a large, fair, dull lady, of fifty-seven or thereabouts, who never took any exercise, and credited the condition of her liver to Providence; but she was nearly as far removed from Miss Frederica Payton as she was from those arboreal ancestors, the very mention of whom would have shocked her religious principles, for Mrs. Payton was very truly and humbly religious. "And church--Freddy never goes to church," she complained. "She plays tennis all Sunday morning. Rather different from our day, isn't it, Bessie? We children were never allowed even to read secular books on Sunday. Well, I think it was better than the laxity of the present. We always wore our best dresses to church, and--" "May I have some more tea, Mrs. Payton?" her auditor murmured, and, the tide of reminiscence thus skilfully dammed, Freddy's offense was finally revealed to him. "Well," he said,--"yes, cream please; a great deal! I hope it's pasteurized?--they were stupid to lose the car. Fred told me all about it yesterday; it appears she was talking to some poor woman about the size of her family"--the two ladies exchanged horrified glances;--"of course, Maitland ought to have broken in on eugenics and hustled her off. But an accident isn't one of the seven deadly sins, and--" "Oh," Fred's mother interrupted, "_of course_ there was nothing wrong." Mr. Weston looked at her admiringly; she really conceived it necessary to say such a thing! Those denied ancestors of hers could hardly have been more direct. It occurred to him, reaching for another lump of sugar, that Frederica came by her talent for free speech honestly. "With her mother, it is free thought. Fred goes one better, that's all," he reflected, dreamily. Once or twice, while the complaints flowed steadily on, he roused himself from his amused abstraction to murmur sympathetic disapproval: "Of course she ought not to say things like that--" "She is impossible!" Mrs. Payton sighed. "Why, she said 'Damn,' right out, before the Rev. Mr. Tait!" "Did she damn Tait? I know him, and really--" "Well, no; I think it was the weather. But that is nothing to the way she talks about old people." "About me, perhaps?" "Oh no; really, no! About you?" Mrs. Payton stammered; "why--how could she say anything about you?" Arthur Weston's eyes twinkled. ("I'll make her tell me what it was," he promised himself.) "As for age," Mrs. Childs corroborated, "she seems to have no respect for it. She spoke quite rudely to her uncle William about Shakespeare and Bacon. She said the subject '_bored_' her." Mr. Weston shook his head, speechless. "And she said," Mrs. Childs went on, her usual detachment sharpening for a moment into personal displeasure, "she said the antis had no brains; and she knows I'm an anti!"