unsuspected “past,” and his widow’s magnanimity. But the opinion of the majority was against this. People were reluctant to charge a dead man with an offense from which he could not clear himself;{159} and the Ralstons unanimously declared that, thoroughly as they disapproved of Mrs. James Ralston’s action, they were convinced that she would not have adopted Tina if her doing so could have been construed as “casting a slur” on her late husband.

{159}

No: the girl was perhaps a Lovell—though even that idea was not generally held—but she was certainly not a Ralston. Her brown eyes and flighty ways too obviously excluded her from the clan for any formal excommunication to be needful. In fact, most people believed that—as Dr. Lanskell had always affirmed—her origin was really undiscoverable, that she represented one of the unsolved mysteries which occasionally perplex and irritate well-regulated societies, and that her adoption by Delia Ralston was simply one more proof of the Lovell clannishness, since the{160} child had been taken in by Mrs. Ralston only because her cousin Charlotte was so attached to it. To say that Mrs. Ralston’s son and daughter were pleased with the idea of Tina’s adoption would be an exaggeration; but they abstained from comment, minimizing the effect of their mother’s whim by a dignified silence. It was the old New York way for families thus to screen the eccentricities of an individual member, and where there was “money enough to go round” the heirs would have been thought vulgarly grasping to protest at the alienation of a small sum from the general inheritance.

{160}

Nevertheless, Delia Ralston, from the moment of Tina’s adoption, was perfectly aware of a different attitude on the part of both her children. They dealt with her patiently, almost parentally, as with a minor in whom one juvenile lapse has{161} been condoned, but who must be subjected, in consequence, to a stricter vigilance; and society treated her in the same indulgent but guarded manner.

{161}

She had (it was Sillerton Jackson who first phrased it) an undoubted way of “carrying things off”; since that dauntless woman, Mrs. Manson Mingott, had broken her husband’s will, nothing so like her attitude had been seen in New York. But Mrs. Ralston’s method was different, and less easy to analyze. What Mrs. Manson Mingott had accomplished by dint of epigram, invective, insistency and runnings to and fro, the other achieved without raising her voice or seeming to take a step from the 

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