His mother was a Lady Barnes; his father, she gathered, was dead; and he was travelling, no doubt, in the lordly English way, to get a little knowledge of the barbarians outside, before he settled down to his own kingdom, and the ways thereof.

She envisaged a big Georgian house in a spreading park, like scores that she had seen in the course of motoring through England the year before.
Meanwhile, the dear young man was evidently trying to talk to her, without too much reference to the gilt gingerbread of this world.

He did not wish that she should feel herself carried into regions where she was not at home, so that his conversation ran amicably on music.

Had she learned it abroad?
He had a cousin who had been trained at Leipsic; wasn't teaching it trying sometimes--when people had no ear?
Delicious! She kept it up, talking with smiles of "my pupils" and "my class," while they wandered after the others upstairs to the dark low-roofed room above the death-chamber, where Martha Washington spent the last years of her life, in order that from the high dormer window she might command the tomb on the slope below, where her dead husband lay.

The curator told the well-known story.