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“Are there any?” said Tony.

It was unpardonably careless of him, but he really had forgotten that the Trents were fairly old, as families go. If their perfectly authenticated pedigree did not go back more than four hundred years, their claims reached up the centuries to before the Norman Conquest, and they considered themselves too well established to worry about age.

Pamela looked clear scorn at him. “I don’t know what you mean,” said she.

“To put it differently, all families are old.”

“Oh, they’re not—families. Blood does count.”

“Of course it does, but then most of us have it. Records are uncertain things, and the families you speak of all began low down. Why, you can often tell by their names. Taillefers and Gowers—yes, and Smiths and Bakers and Carters, among your ‘good families.’ Grit in the first instance (or unscrupulousness, or luck), and afterwards the power and refining influences of wealth. But I’m afraid this is what we were talking about before.”

“But the good names that never mixed———” began Pamela stiffly, and stopped. She did not wish to discuss it, but these ideas were so strange to her that she was rather bewildered, and hardly knew what to say. After all, it was her first season, and she was not yet experienced in steering conversation.

“Like the Howards, your oldest, aren’t they?—whose name means swineherd, and there’s no harm in that. I admit that when they’ve had money for some hundreds of years—and consequently opportunity and education and fine food—they do evolve into something different. That’s only natural. They ought to.”

Pamela bit her lip on an angry word. She would not give him the satisfaction of an answer this time. Oh, he had no right to look at her with that smile, as if she were