Judge Thornton, white-headed, fresh-faced, as good at sixty as he
was at forty, with a youngish second wife, and one noble daughter,
Arabella, who, they said, knew as much law as her father, a stately,
Portia-like girl, fit for a premier's wife, not like to find her match
even in the great cities she sometimes visited; the Trecothicks, the
family of a merchant, (in the larger sense,) who, having made himself
rich enough by the time he had reached middle life, threw down his
ledger as Sylla did his dagger, and retired to make a little paradise
around him in one of the stateliest residences of the town, a family
inheritance; the Vaughans, an old Rockland race, descended from its
first settlers, Toryish in tendency in Revolutionary times, and barely
escaping confiscation or worse; the Dunhams, a new family, dating its
gentility only as far back as the Honorable Washington Dunham, M.C.,
but turning out a clever boy or two that went to college, and some
showy girls with white necks and fat arms who had picked up
professional husbands: these were the principal mansion-house people.
All of them had made it a point to come; and as each of them entered,
it seemed to Colonel and Mrs.
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