Always when I think we are going to have some weddings,
you see a bigger thing ahead, and I undergo another disappointment.
_I_ think you are too hard to please. Some day we'll get left.
First, we turned down the dentist and the lawyer. That was all right
--it was sound. Next, we turned down the banker's son and the
pork-butcher's heir--right again, and sound. Next, we turned
down the Congressman's son and the Governor's--right as a trivet,
I confess it. Next the Senator's son and the son of the Vice-President
of the United States--perfectly right, there's no permanency about
those little distinctions. Then you went for the aristocracy;
and I thought we had struck oil at last--yes. We would make
a plunge at the Four Hundred, and pull in some ancient lineage,
venerable, holy, ineffable, mellow with the antiquity of a hundred
and fifty years, disinfected of the ancestral odors of salt-cod
and pelts all of a century ago, and unsmirched by a day's work since,
and then! why, then the marriages, of course. But no, along comes
a pair a real aristocrats from Europe, and straightway you throw over
the half-breeds. It was awfully discouraging, Aleck! Since then,
what a procession! You turned down the baronets for a pair
of barons; you turned down the barons for a pair of viscounts;
the viscounts for a pair of earls; the earls for a pair of marquises;
the marquises for a brace of dukes.
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