ped it to the effect of
a shrine, and a large face in which the odd blackness of eyebrow and of
a couple of other touches suggested the conventional marks of a painted
image. She signified her wants as divinities do, for I recover from her
presence neither sound nor stir, remembering of her only that, as
described by her companions, the pious ministrants, she had "said" so
and so when she hadn't spoken at all. Was she really, as she seemed, so
tremendously old, so old that her daughter, our mother's cousin Helen
and ours, would have had to come to her in middle life to account for
it, or did antiquity at that time set in earlier and was surrender of
appearance and dress, matching the intrinsic decay, only more
complacent, more submissive and, as who should say, more abject? I have
my choice of these suppositions, each in its way of so lively an
interest that I scarce know which to prefer, though inclining perhaps a
little to the idea of the backward reach. If Aunt Wyckoff was, as I
first remember her, scarce more than seventy, say, the thought fills me
with one sort of joy, the joy of our modern, our so generally greater
and nobler effect of duration: who _wouldn't_ more subtly strive for
that effect and, intelligently so striving, reach it better, than such
non-questioners of fate?--the moral of whose case is surely that if they
gave up too soon and too softly we wiser witnesses can reverse the
process and fight the whole ground. But I apologise to the heavy shade
in question if she had really drained her conceivable cup, and for that
matter rather like to suppose it, so rich and strange is the pleasure of
finding the past--the Past above all--answered for to one's own touch,
this being our only way to be sure of it. It was the Past that one
touched in her, the American past of a preponderant unthinkable
queerness; and great would seem the fortune of helping on the continuity
at some other far end.

X

It was at all events the good lady's disappearance that more markedly
cleared the decks--cleared them for that long, slow, sustained action
with which I make out that nothing was afterwards to interfere. She had
sat there under her stiff old father's portrait, with which her own, on
the other side of the chimney, mildly balanced; but these presences
acted from that time but with cautious reserves. A brave, finished,
clear-eyed image of such properties as the last-named, in particular,
our already-mentioned Alex