And what a flood of anecdotes it let loose! A flood that bore us
straight back to Castleman Hall, and to all the scenes of her young
ladyhood! If only Lady Dee could have revised this book of Veblen's,
how many points she could have given to him! No details had been too
minute for the technique of Sylvia's great-aunt--the difference
between the swish of the right kind of silk petticoats and the wrong
kind; and yet her technique had been broad enough to take in a
landscape. "Every girl should have a background," had been one of
her maxims, and Sylvia had to have a special phaeton to drive, a
special horse to ride, special roses which no one else was allowed
to wear.
"Conspicuous expenditure of time," wrote Veblen. It was curious,
said Sylvia, but nobody was free from this kind of vanity. There was
dear old Uncle Basil, a more godly bishop never lived, and yet he
had a foible for carving! In his opinion the one certain test of a
gentleman was the ease with which he found the joints of all kinds
of meat, and he was in arms against the modern tendency to turn such
accomplishments over to butlers. He would hold forth on the subject,
illustrating his theories with an elegant knife, and Sylvia
remembered how her father and the Chilton boys had wired up the
joints of a duck for the bishop to work on.
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