still to be uplifted, wanders off to browse on coloured supplements and
magazine stories.
If you are ignorant of Lora Delane Porter's books that is your affair.
Perhaps you are more to be pitied than censured. Nature probably gave
you the wrong shape of forehead. Mrs. Porter herself would have put
it down to some atavistic tendency or pre-natal influence. She put
most things down to that. She blamed nearly all the defects of the
modern world, from weak intellects to in-growing toe-nails, on
long-dead ladies and gentlemen who, safe in the family vault, imagined
that they had established their alibi. She subpoenaed grandfathers
and even great-grandfathers to give evidence to show that the reason
Twentieth-Century Willie squinted or had to spend his winters in
Arizona was their own shocking health 'way back in the days beyond
recall.
Mrs. Porter's mind worked backward and forward. She had one eye on the
past, the other on the future. If she was strong on heredity, she was
stronger on the future of the race. Most of her published works dealt
with this subject. A careful perusal of them would have enabled the
rising generation to select its ideal wife or husband with perfect
ease, and, in the event of Heaven blessing the union, her little
volume, entitled 'The Hygienic Care of the Baby,' which was all about
germs and how to avoid them, would have insured the continuance of the
direct succession.
Unfortunately, the rising generation did not seem disposed to a careful
perusal of anything except the baseball scores and the beauty hints in
the Sunday papers, and Mrs. Porter's public was small. In fact, her
only real disciple, as she sometimes told herself in her rare moods of
discouragement, was her niece, Ruth Bannister, daughter of John
Bannister, the millionaire. It was not so long ago, she reflected with
pride, that she had induced Ruth to refuse to marry Basil Milbank, a
considerable feat, he being a young man of remarkable personal
attractions and a great match in every way. Mrs. Porter's objection to
him was that his father had died believing to the last that he was a
teapot.
There is nothing evil or degrading in believing oneself a teapot, but
it argues a certain inaccuracy of the thought processes; and Mrs.
Porter had used all her influence with Ruth to make her reject Basil.
It was her success that first showed her how great that influence was.
She had come now to look on Ruth's destiny as something for which she
was personally responsible, a fact which was noted and resented by
others, in particular Ruth's brother Bailey, who regarded his aunt with
a dislike and suspicion akin to that which a stray dog feels towards
the boy who saunters towards him with a tin can in his hand.
To Bailey, his strong-minded relative was a perpetual menace, a sort of
perambulating yellow peril, and the fact that she often alluded to him
as a worm consolidated his distaste for her.
* * * * *
Mrs. Porter released the clutch and set out on her drive. She rarely
had a settled route for these outings of hers, preferring to zigzag
about New York, livening up the great city at random. She always drove
