  A recently presented HST/FGS parallax measurement of the Polaris system has
been interpreted as evidence for the Cepheid Polaris Aa to be pulsating in the
second overtone. An age discrepancy between components A and B has been noted
and discussed in terms of a stellar merger. Here I show that the new parallax
of Polaris is consistent with a simpler interpretation of Polaris as a $7
\rm{M}_\odot,$ first-overtone, classical Cepheid near the hot boundary of the
first instability strip crossing. This picture is anchored to rates of period
change, the period-luminosity relation, the location in color-magnitude space,
the interferometrically determined radius, spectroscopic N/C and N/O
enhancements, and a dynamical mass measurement. The detailed agreement between
models and data corroborates the physical association between the Cepheid and
its visual companion as well as the accuracy of the HST parallax. The age
discrepancy between components A and B is confirmed and requires further
analysis, for example to investigate the possibility of stellar mergers in an
evaporating birth cluster of which the Polaris triple system would be the
remaining core.
