As they passed on she spoke to him with an increasing, almost unnatural gayety.  He had a new appreciation of what her charm must have been when she was a girl.  The rooms were full of memories to her; many of the articles that she caressed with her fingers, and lingered over with reluctant eyes, connected themselves with days and nights of revelry and the joy of living; also with prides and deeds which ennobled her recollection.

“You and Dent know that your father divided equally all that he had.  But everything in the house is mine, and I have made no will and shall not make any.  What is mine belongs to you two alike.  Still, I have made a list of things that I think he would rather have, and a list of things for you—­merely because I wish to give something to each of you directly.”

In a room on a lower floor she unlocked a closet, the walls of which were lined with shelves.  She peeped in; then she withdrew her head and started to lock the door again; but she changed her mind and laughed.

“Do you know what these things are?” She touched a large box, and he carried it over to the bed and she lifted the top off, exposing the contents.  “Did you ever see anything so black?  This was the clerical robe in which one of your ancestors used to read his sermons.  He is the one who wrote the treatise on ’God Properly and Unproperly Understood.’  He was the great seminarian in your father’s family—­the portrait in the hall, you know.  I shall not decide whether you or Dent must inherit this; decide for yourselves; I imagine you will end it in the quarrel.  How black it is, and what black sermons flew out of it—­ravens, instead of white doves, of the Holy Spirit.  He was the friend of Jonathan Edwards.”  She made a wry face as he put the box back into the closet; and she laughed again as she locked it in.

“Here are some things from my side of the family.”  And she drew open a long drawer and spoke with proud reticence.  They stood looking down at part of the uniform of an officer of the Revolution.  She lifted one corner of it and disclosed a sword beneath.  She lifted another corner of the coat and exposed a roll of parchment.  “I suppose I should have had this parchment framed and hung up downstairs, so that it would be the first thing seen by any one entering the front door; and this sword should have been suspended over the fireplace, or have been exposed under a glass case in the parlors; and the uniform should have been fitted on a tailor’s manikin; and we should have lectured to our guests on our worship of our ancestors—­in the new American way, in the Chino-American way.  But I’m afraid we go to the other extreme, Rowan; perhaps we are proud of the fact that we are not boastful.  Instead of concerning ourselves with those who shed glory on us, we have concerned ourselves with the question whether we are shedding glory on them.  Still, I wonder whether our ancestors may not possibly be offended that we say so little about them!”