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By Root 5078 0

with a description of this city of towers. He felt worldly and saturnine like a character in a movie. A pretty maid let him in and took him into a parlor for which he was completely unprepared. The walls were half-paneled like the dining-room walls at West Farm. Most of the furniture he recognized since most of it had been stored in the hayloft when he was a boy. There, over the mantelpiece, hung old Benjamin himself, in his peignoir or Renaissance costume, staring out into the room with that harsh and naked look of dishonesty that had made him so unpopular with the family. Most of the lamps had come from the barn or the attic and Grandmother Wapshot’s old moth-eaten sampler (“Unto Us a Son Is Given”) was hanging on the wall. Coverly was studying old Benjamin’s stare when Cousin Mildred blew in—a tall, gaunt woman in a red evening dress that seemed cut to display her bony shoulders. “Coverly!” she exclaimed. “My dear. How nice of you to come. You look just like a Wapshot. Harry will be thrilled. He adores Wapshots. Sit down. We’ll have something to drink. Where are you staying? Who was the woman who answered the telephone? Tell me all about Honora. Oh, you do look like a Wapshot. I would have been able to pick you out in a crowd. Isn’t it nice to be able to recognize people? There’s another Wapshot in New York. Justina. They say she used to play the piano in the five-and-ten-cent store but she’s very rich now. We’ve had Benjamin cleaned. Don’t you think he looks better. Did you notice? Of course, he still looks like a crook. Have a cocktail.”

The butler passed Coverly a cocktail on a tray. He had never drunk a martini cocktail before and to conceal his inexperience he raised the glass to his lips and drained it. He didn’t cough and sputter but his eyes swam with tears, the gin felt like fire and some oscillation or defense mechanism in his larynx began to palpitate in such a way that he found himself unable to speak. He settled down to a paroxysm of swallowing. “Of course, this isn’t my idea of a decent room at all,” Cousin Mildred went on. “It’s all Harry’s idea. I’d much rather have called in a decorator and gotten something comfortable but Harry’s mad for New England. He’s an adorable man and a wizard in the carpet business, but he doesn’t come from anyplace really. I mean he doesn’t have anything nice to remember and so he borrows other people’s memories. He’s really more of a Wapshot than you or I.”

“Does he know about Benjamin’s ear?” Coverly asked hoarsely. It was still hard for him to speak.

“My dear, he knows the family history backwards and forwards,” Cousin Mildred said. “He went to England and had the name traced back to Vaincre-Chaud and he got the crest. I’m sure he knows more about Lorenzo than Honora ever did. He bought all these things from your mother and I must say he paid for them generously and I’m not absolutely sure that your mother—I don’t mean to say that your mother was untruthful—but you know that old traveling desk that always used to be full of mice? Well, your mother wrote and said that it belonged to Benjamin Franklin and I don’t ever remember having heard that before.”

This hint or slur at his mother’s veracity made Coverly feel sad and homesick and annoyed with his cousin’s rattling conversational style and the pretentions of simplicity and homeliness in her parlor and he might have said something about this, but the butler refilled his glass again and when he took another gulp of gin the oscillations in his larynx began all over again and he couldn’t speak. Then Mr. Brewer came in—he was much shorter than his wife—a jolly pink-faced man with a quietness that might have been developed to complement the noise she made. “So you’re a Wapshot,” he said to Coverly when they shook hands. “Well, as Mildred may have told you, I’m very much interested in the family. Most of these things come from the homestead in St. Botolphs. That cradle rocked four generations of the Wapshot family. It was made by the village undertaker. That tulip-wood table was made from a tree that stood on the lawn at West