The Bridgeport evening farmer., 1909-05-18


 .H period of their young lives, had
 left an indelfble imprint upon the two young people.
 Horace Simpson had taken to him. self the manners of the Harrow and Oxford youth. He had eschewed the society of what he had learned, with parrot-hke aptness, to call those "vul- gar Americans" and had confined his social intercourse solely to such of the European ''haut ton" as he could man. age to scrape acquaintance with.
 And this last was a somewhat uphill task, for. whatever else one may say about the English. they are inclined to view with very little favor the pos sessor of no other attribute than money. True. there are exceptions, and these but prove the rule
 Ethel, who had grown into a really beautiful young woman, had followed suit, so far as in her modest powers lay. Such of her school friends as would permit the half formed ac- quaintance to ripen she had retained. Such others of her own modest begin nings she had quietly but emphatically dropped. From plain democracy she had sought the antithesis, and the leap was all the moro an earnest one be- cause of its breadth.
 The Simpsons-and they had added their mothers maiden name and-1inked 1t to the paternal nomenclature with a hyphen-had been deeply bitten with the aristocratic virus and after a long and arduous struggle had managed to meet Lady Oreech.
 This titled mondaine had the misfor- tune to be vfciously short of patrimony and inordinately long of lineage, and, while her life of self denial had doubt less imbittered her, she had a most inord1nate value of birth and distinc. appreciation of cash; hence when it came her way to pick the Granger Simpsons out of the slough of com monplace acquaintance she did it with a royal favor and for stipulated con sideration.
 "Really, my dear Hawcastle''eehe pronounced it as old sailors pronounce 'fo'c's'tle"-she was wont to say. really, of course, they are quite i'm possible, but the girl is an adaptable little thing, and I may be able to make something of her in time, while tho boy-ah, I fear I shall have to leave him to you and St. Aubyn-" DO dS yOu IcpllCo tHo I1f1I1 OA Hawcastle, with some choler. but keep them out of my way as much as possible. I positively will not be badg- cred by these unbaked colonists." ~One might stand a quantity of badgering, Newcastle, for fSoo,O 900. " at which the genial earl would squirm nervously.
 At any rate, the Simpson children ~ 1>< lx~ AI,, I<rfro fV1rv of London society and met endless numbers of the shopworn nobility, but. sad to relate, never one of the truly respectable. To those who know their London there are several layers of no bility, and the layer the ordinary fn- dividual meets, who has no social pres t1ge to begin with, is composed of that peculiar class that lends It's name to doubtful directorates, to queer pros pectuses, to struggling milliners with an eye on the main chance and who gladly extend unlimited credit to their patrons in return for modest and we'll put advertisement.
 Strangely enough, the Hawcastle- Creech combination did not drag the willing Simpsons into the glitterfng presence of the real set.
 On the contrary, with a somewhat dog in the manager policy, they awak- ened both the earl and his sister-tn- law to the fact that they wished no sharers in those American dollars that John Simpson had sweated his brow for, and as a consequence they pro- posed little trip-a quiet, ante-season trip-to Sorrento, where not a guest would disturb them and where mat ters might be given a chance to right themselves.
 And there, strangely enough, the Simpsons met the Comtesse de Cham pigny and were quite delighted to find the gifted and brilliant Frenchwoman hi f,o of fla<x 1raa aocond