As our train moved out Mrs. Effie summoned me for a serious talk
concerning the significance of our present visit; not of the
wilderness dangers to which we might be exposed, but of its social
aspects, which seemed to be of prime importance. We were to visit, I
learned, one Charles Belknap-Jackson of Boston and Red Gap, he being a
person who mattered enormously, coming from one of the very oldest
families of Boston, a port on their east coast, and a place, I
gathered, in which some decent attention is given to the matter of who
has been one's family. A bit of a shock it was to learn that in this
rough land they had their castes and precedences. I saw I had been
right to suspect that even a crude society could not exist without its
rules for separating one's superiors from the lower sorts. I began to
feel at once more at home and I attended the discourse of Mrs. Effie
with close attention.
The Boston person, in one of those irresponsibly romantic moments that
sometimes trap the best of us, had married far beneath him, espousing
the simple daughter of one of the crude, old-settling families of Red
Gap. Further, so inattentive to details had he been, he had neglected
to secure an ante-nuptial settlement as our own men so wisely make it
their rule to do, and was now suffering a painful embarrassment from
this folly; for the mother-in-law, controlling the rather sizable
family fortune, had harshly insisted that the pair reside in Red Gap,
permitting no more than an occasional summer visit to his native
Boston, whose inhabitants she affected not to admire.
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