of us knew Emma, that we underestimated both her emotional
capacity and her resourcefulness, and, finally, in a burst of rash
clairvoyancy he declared that she would give away both the St. Michael
and herself, but in her own time and manner, and with some odd personal
reservation that would content us all. We should see.

Given the rare mixture of the conventional and instinctive that was Emma
Verplanck, something of the sort did indeed seem probable. For ten years
she had inhabited her nook, becoming as much of a fixture among us as the
Campanile below. She came, like so many, for the cheapness and dignity of
it primarily. Here her little patrimony meant independence, safety from
perfunctory and uncongenial contacts at home, and more positively all
those purtenances of the gentlewoman that she required. But, unlike the
merely thrifty Italianates, she never became blunted by our incessant tea
giving and receiving. With familiarity, the ineffable sweetness of the
country penetrated her with ever-new impressions. She loved the
overlapping blue hills that stretched away endlessly from the rim of her
valley, and the scarred crag that closed it from behind. She loved the
climbing white roads, her chalky brook--sung as a river by the early
poets--with its bordering poplars and willows and its processional
display of violets, anemones, primroses, blueflags, and roses. She loved
even better that constant passing trickle of fine intelligences which
feeds the Arno valley as her brook refreshed its vineyard. The best of
these came gladly to her, for she was an open and a disillusioned spirit,
with something of a man's downrightness under her sensitive appreciation.
Hers was the calm of a temperament fined but not dulled by conformity and
experience. Mrs. Dennis, whose sources of information were excellent,
said it was rather an unhappy girlish affair with an unworthy cousin.
Within the limits of the possible, the Verplancks always married cousins,
and Emma, it was thought, had in her 'teens paid sentimental homage to
the family tradition. In any case she remained surprisingly youthful
under her nearly forty years. Her capacity for intellectual adventure
seemed only to increase as she passed from the first glow to proved
impressions of books, art, persons, and the all-inclusive Tuscan nature.

Her Stuyvesant Square aunts, who were authorities on self-sacrifice,
agreed that the only sacrifice Emma had made in a thoroughly selfish lif