"I hope you don't mind my asking Miss Penwick as the only lady," Mrs.
Sampson said to her guest; "but she is such a dear old creature, and
our family and hers have been intimate for centuries. She is getting
old, poor dear, and she hasn't any money any more, just as I haven't.
But you know she is wiser than Minerva's owl, and quite the fashion in
Boston. One really is nobody who doesn't know Miss Penwick; and she is
_so_ well bred."
Miss Penwick, dear old soul, had a feeling that Mrs. Amanda Welsh
Sampson was somehow too hopelessly modern for one of her generation
ever to be really in sympathy with the widow; but Mrs. Sampson had been
born a Welsh, and Miss Catherine was too unworldly to be aware of all
the gossip and even scandal which had made the name of the dashing
adventuress of so evil savor in the nostrils of people like Mrs.
Frederick Staggchase.
And it must be confessed also, that to such petty economies was the
last of the Penwicks reduced by poverty that a dinner was an object to
her. She could not afford to lose an opportunity of dining at the price
of two horse-car tickets, and so promptly at the moment she presented
herself in the dainty elegance of bits of real old lace, with family
miniatures and locks of hair from the illustrious heads of great-great-
grandmothers and grandfathers decorously framed in split pearls, the
lustre of the jewels, like that of their wearer, tarnished by time.
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