Transcriber’s Note:
The cover image was created by the transcriber and is placed in the public domain.
AN EPISODE
IN THE
Doings of the Dualized.
CHAPTER I.
This was the way it happened. Like all beginnings of things,the roots were in the dark. Ethelbert Daksha came of afamily in which girls counted for a big half of all that was brightand interesting.
The Dakshas were a delightful family every way, except, perhaps,in the matter of money-wealth. That seemed constitutionally lacking,because you will see yourself that people who take great interest indevising ways of spending money, and very little in devising ways ofgetting it to spend, in the constitution of things are lacking in money-wealth.But they had everything else except money, and their chiefthought in regard to that lack was an amiable perplexity that it seemedto be such a desideratum in affairs of society. There was a big butexhausted English property on the mother’s side; and this strain ofhigh English blood was mixed with a dash of hard-headed Germanculture and a few drops from the veins of a Spanish dame, lady-motherof the Hidalgos. So, you see, when, ninety years before, a discontentwith something in the Old World society had set the elder Dakshadown on American soil, various European nationalities were transplantedto root as best might be in American civilization. In additionto all this, as faith in all things high, bounded brightly in the DanielO’Connell blood which coursed through Daniel Daksha’s veins, it wasvery natural that his daughter Ethelbert, considering as she did thatall nationalities were equally admirable for different virtues, shouldbe greatly astonished that there should be quarrels between those ofdifferent countries, when the blood of four nations coursed so amicablyin her own veins. If ever there were a girl who, in the nature ofthings was a typical American, it was Ethelbert Daksha, with the race-drift6of Europe, Asia and Africa in her individual veins, as our nationcarries it in its aggregated citizenship.
Mr. Daksha recognized all this. He was one of the dreamers whowork, at whose feet life lays its crown of success; although so far hismany admirable schemes for regenerating society had made him at oncethe most serviceable and the most impecunious of mortals. He hadabundant means, but little money; and while it might be stretchinga point to say the Dakshas cultivated a life of beauty on a little oatmeal,yet it would give a hint at the way in which beauty was cultivated inthat simple home, where oatmeal was the chief of th