The Little Lady of The Big House by Jack London Chapter 18 Page 3

been her childhood prince. His ways had been big ways, princely ways — ways that to commoner folk had betokened a streak of madness. He was continually guilty of the wildest things and the most chivalrous things. It was this streak that had enabled him to win various fortunes, and with equal facility to lose them, in the great gold adventure of Forty-nine. Himself of old New England stock, he had had for great grandfather a Frenchman — a trifle of flotsam from a mid- ocean wreck and landed to grow up among the farmer-sailormen of the coast of Maine.

“And once, and once only, in each generation, that French Desten crops out,” Mrs. Tully assured Graham. “Philip was that Frenchman in his generation, and who but Paula, and in full measure, received that same inheritance in her generation.