“Why are you so proud of Ebenezer?” she demanded once, scornfully.

“Why?  Aren’t we descended from him?”

“How many generations?”

“Seven,” said Edward, promptly, emphasizing the last syllable.

Janet was quick at figures.  She made a mental calculation.

“Well, you’ve got one hundred and twenty-seven other ancestors of Ebenezer’s time, haven’t you?”

Edward was a little surprised.  He had never thought of this, but his ardour for Ebenezer remained undampened.  Genealogy—­his own—­had become his religion, and instead of going to church he spent his Sunday mornings poring over papers of various degrees of discolouration, making careful notes on the ruled block.

This consciousness of his descent from good American stock that had somehow been deprived of its heritage, while a grievance to him, was also a comfort.  It had a compensating side, in spite of the lack of sympathy of his daughters and his wife.  Hannah Bumpus took the situation more grimly:  she was a logical projection in a new environment of the religious fatalism of ancestors whose God was a God of vengeance.  She did not concern herself as to what all this vengeance was about; life was a trap into which all mortals walked sooner or later, and her particular trap had a treadmill,—­a round of household duties she kept whirling with an energy that might have made their fortunes if she had been the head of the family.  It is bad to be a fatalist unless one has an incontrovertible belief in one’s destiny,—­which Hannah had not.  But she kept the little flat with its worn furniture,—­which had known so many journeys—­as clean as a merchant ship of old Salem, and when it was scoured and dusted to her satisfaction she would sally forth to Bonnaccossi’s grocery and provision store on the corner to do her bargaining in competition with the Italian housewives of the neighborhood.  She was wont, indeed, to pause outside for a moment, her quick eye encompassing the coloured prints of red and yellow jellies cast in rounded moulds, decked with slices of orange, the gaudy boxes of cereals and buckwheat flour, the “Brookfield” eggs in packages.  Significant, this modern package system, of an era of flats with little storage space.  She took in at a glance the blue lettered placard announcing the current price of butterine, and walked around to the other side of the store, on Holmes Street, where the beef and bacon hung, where the sidewalk stands were filled, in the autumn, with cranberries, apples, cabbages, and spinach.

With little outer complaint she had adapted herself to the constantly lowering levels to which her husband had dropped, and if she hoped that in Fillmore Street they had reached bottom, she did not say so.  Her unbetrayed regret was for the loss of what she would have called “respectability”; and the giving up, long ago, in the little city which had been their home, of the servant girl had been the first