The Reaping by Mary Imlay Taylor

ALLESTREE lived alone with his widowed mother in a roomy, old-fashioned mansion in one of the older residential sections, which stand now like decadent environs of the more brilliant quarters where the millionaire and the multi-millionaire erect their palaces. But these changes, in matters of fashion and display, did not trouble the serene bosom of old Mrs. Allestree, who felt that she held her place in the world by the inalienable rights of birth, blood, and long established family position, for, happily, she had as yet no notion of the shadowy nature of such claims in the event of financial disaster, which is as impersonal as the deluge. She was contentedly aware that her old-fashioned drawing-rooms had been the scene of many a brilliant gathering even before her nephew, William Fox, became such a figure in the public eye that his frequent presence in her house was enough to draw there the most distinguished and representative men at the capital.

But the old lady herself was clever, shrewdly conversant with the world and its affairs, and not averse to giving ear to the current gossip; she was, indeed, often amused at her son's aloofness from these worldly concerns which pleased and interested her the most. For, though a detached spectator, because of her age and her comparatively delicate health, she was yet keenly aware of the drift of events both social and political, and possessed the advantages of age in being able to make comparisons between the past and the present, with a touch of eclecticism amusing in one who had been so devotedly attached to the frivolities of fashion. She could draw more accurate deductions than many who were more intimately concerned in the whirling conflict of social and political ambitions which was raging around her. When the President quarrelled with the party leaders, when Congress administered a rebuke by withholding a vote of confidence, she was able to recall this or that parallel case, this or that precedent for an action which to many seemed unprecedented, and when the entertainments at the White House began to evolve a new system of exclusions she could point out an incident when some former President's wife had tried to introduce a similar measure and had met with disaster on leaving her stronghold, lost at once in the current of a social millrace which whirls to oblivion the queen of yesterday and the leader of to-day, engulfing all past glories in a maelstrom of forgetfulness; the inevitable condition in a republican society where there can be no hereditary distinction and those of class are constantly fluctuating with the rise and fall of fortunes, the manipulations of the Stock Exchange, while birth and breeding have no consideration at all in comparison with the purchase power of gold.