David Price, Miss Flossy's father, was the president of a small and unprogressive but eminently solid bank. Respectable routine was his motto, and he lived up to it, and, as a consequence, no more sound institution of the kind existed in his neighborhood. He and his directors were slow to adopt innovations of any kind; they put stumbling blocks in the path of business convenience whenever they could; in short, David Price in his humble way was a righteous, narrow, hide-bound retarder of progress and worshipper of established local custom. Therefore it was a constant source of surprise and worry to him that he should have a progressive daughter. There were four other children, patterns of quiet, plodding conservatism, but--such is the irony of fate--the youngest, prettiest, and his favorite, was an independent, opinionated young woman, who seemed to turn a deaf ear to paternal and maternal advice of safest New Jersey type. In her father's words, she had no reverence for any thing or any body, which was approximately true, for she did not hesitate to speak disrespectfully even of the head of the house in New York. "Poppa," she said one day, "Cousin Morton doesn't care for any of us a little bit. I know what you're going to say," she added; "that he sends you two turkeys every Thanksgiving. The last were terribly tough. I'm sure he thinks that we never see turkeys here in New Jersey, and that he considers us poor relations and that we live in a hole. If one of us should call on him, I know it would distress him awfully. He's right in thinking that this is a hole. Nothing ever happens here, and when I marry I intend to live in New York." This was when she was seventeen. Her father was greatly shocked, especially as he suspected in his secret soul that the tirade was true in substance. He had been the recipient of Thanksgiving turkeys for nearly twenty years on the plea that they had been grown on the donor's farm in Westchester county, and he had seen fit to invite his fellow-directors annually to dine off one of them as a modest notice that he was on friendly terms with his aristocratic New York cousin. But in all these twenty years turkeys had been the only medium of intercourse between them. David Price, on the few occasions when he had visited New York, had not found it convenient to call. Once he had walked by on the other side of Fifth avenue and looked at the house, but shyness and the thought that he had no evening clothes in his valise had restrained him from ringing the doorbell. "You do your cousin Morton great injustice--great injustice, Florence," he answered. "He never forgets to send the turkeys, and as to the rest of your speech, I have only to say that it is very disrespectful and very foolish. The next time I go to New York I will take you to call on your cousins."