bookcase, with the bare shelves hidden behind plaited magenta silk, and directly above it hung an engraving of a group of amiable children feeding fish in a pond.  Across the room, over the walnut whatnot, a companion picture represented the same group of children scattering crumbs before a polite brood of chickens in a barnyard.  Between the windows a third engraving immortalized the “Burial of Latané” in the presence of several sad and resigned ladies in crinolines, while the sofa on which Jane sat was presided over by a Sully portrait of the beautiful Angelica Carr, wearing a white scarf on her head and holding a single rose in her hand.  This portrait and a Saint Memin drawing of Mrs. Carr’s grandfather, the Reverend Bartholomew Berkeley as a young man in a high stock, were the solitary existing relics of that consecrated past when Fanny Berkeley was “not brought up to do anything.”

To Mrs. Carr, whose mind was so constituted that any change in her surroundings produced a sensation of shock, the room was hallowed by the simple fact that she had lived in it for a number of years.  That an object or a custom had existed in the past appeared to her to be an incontestible reason why it should continue to exist in the present.  It was distressing to her to be obliged to move a picture or to alter the position of a piece of furniture, and she had worn one shape of bonnet and one style of hairdressing, slightly modified to suit the changing fashions, for almost twenty years.  Her long pale face, her pensive blue eyes, and her look of anxious sweetness, made a touching picture of feminine incompetence; and yet it was from this pallid warmth, this gentle inefficiency of soul, that the buoyant spirit of Gabriella had sprung.

For Gabriella was the incarnation of energy.  From the moment of her birth when, in the words of her negro “mammy” she had looked “as peart as life,” she had begun her battle against the enveloping twin powers of decay and inertia.  To the intense secret mortification of her mother, who had prayed for a second waxlike infant after the fashion of poor Jane, she had been a notoriously ugly baby (almost as ugly as her Aunt Becky Bollingbroke who had never married), and as she grew up, this ugliness was barely redeemed by what Jane, in her vague way, described as “the something else in her face.”  According to Cousin Jimmy, who never recognized charm unless its manifestations were soft and purring, this “something else” was merely “a sunny temper”; and one of the constant afflictions of Gabriella’s childhood was overhearing her mother remark to visitors:  “No, she isn’t so pretty as poor Jane, but, as Cousin Jimmy tells us, she is blessed with a sunny temper.”

“Give me that ruffle, mother, and I’ll whip the lace on while we’re waiting,” she said now, laying aside the skirt of her Easter dress, and stretching out her hand for the strip of cambric in her mother’s lap.  But Mrs. Carr did not hear, for she was gazing, with the concentrated stare of Jane’s baby, at a beautiful old lady who was walking slowly through the faint sunshine on the opposite pavement.