Page:Her Roman Lover (Frothingham, 1911).djvu/27

 undertaken more than we are equal to. We have now been here two weeks and I do not yet know how to pronounce my butler’s name. It seems impossible to call him Dionysius to his face.”

“I think it is Dioniseo,” said Anne, with a good Italian accent; “and oh, Aunt Margaret, he is such a beautiful, wonderful butler!”

Her aunt was unresponsive. “He is too wonderful,” she said, and, looking above her, she added, “What enormous wall-space! I wonder why they made the ceiling so very high above the floor.”

Margaret Garrison had little temperamental understanding of her niece, but in their own land they belonged among those people whose culture and comparative wealth are inherited possessions. Since their country had become a nation, generations of their grandfathers had stood for something in the statesmanship and scholarship of national life. Generations of their grandmothers had moved through the social world with stately consciousness of supremacy in it. They had not usually been very rich, for the men of that day had other occupations than money-making. The industrial furnace of modern American life had not yet been cast, and the “aristocracy of wealth” was unknown.

But however different in temperament, certain