Bertrande Hautville Montaigne du Biffington was not an orphan.
He was an Ancient and Excepted Odd Fellow.
He was of a noble and numerous parentage. He had one mother, and
she was a Chicago printcess. She used to hold brevier cases on _The
Daily Tomahawk_. She had ten divorces, neatly framed, hanging up in
her parlor, and Bertrande, whose own original father had died of an
hereditary attack of arsenic in the soup while his divorce suit was
pending, was successively flogged by an illustrious line of paternal
incumbents, and acknowledged the sway of one father, full rank, and
ten fathers by brevet. He loved the lonely orphan, who had no parents
whatever, from a sense of natural duty and justice, to kind of even the
thing up and strike an equitable average.