lier ancestors, going back to the time when
Copley made masterpieces of his fellow-Bostonians. Her aunt herself
looked a family portrait of the middle period, a little anterior to her
father's, but subsequent to her great-grandfather's. She had a comely
face, with large, smooth cheeks and prominent eyes; the edges of her
decorous brown wig were combed rather near their corners, and a fitting
cap palliated but did not deny the wig. She had the quiet but rather
dull look of people slightly deaf, and she had perhaps been stupefied by
a life of unalloyed prosperity and propriety. She had grown an old maid
naturally, but not involuntarily, and she was without the sadness or
the harshness of disappointment. She had never known much of the world,
though she had always lived in it. She knew that it was made up of two
kinds of people--people who were like her and people who were not like
her; and she had lived solely in the society of people who were like
her, and in the shelter of their opinions and ideals. She did not
contemn or exclude the people who were unlike her, but she had never
had any more contact with them than she now had with the weather of the
streets, as she sat, filling her large arm-chair full of her ladylike
correctness, in the library of the handsome house her father had left
her. The irruption of her brother's son and daughter into its cloistered
quiet had scarcely broken its invulnerable order. It was right and fit
they should be there after his death, and it was not strange that in
the course of time they should both show certain unregulated tendencies
which, since they were not known to be Lynde tendencies, must have been
derived from the Southwestern woman her brother had married during his
social and financial periclitations in a region wholly inconceivable to
her. Their mother was dead, too, and their aunt's life closed about them
with full acceptance, if not complacence, as part of her world. They had
grown to manhood and womanhood without materially discomposing her
faith in the old-fashioned Unitarian deity, whose service she had always
attended.

When Alan left college in his Freshman year, and did not go back, but
went rather to Europe and Egypt and Japan, it appeared to her myopic
optimism that his escapades had been pretty well hushed up by time and
distance. After he came home and devoted himself to his club, she could
have wished that he had taken up some profession or business; but since
ther