to
help his family. The literary phase of the superstition concerning him
was humored by the library which formed such a striking feature of his
house in Boston, as well as his house in Hatboro'; at Hatboro' it was
really vast, and was so charming and so luxurious that it gave the idea
of a cultivated family; they preferred to live in it, and rarely used
the drawing-room, which was much smaller, and was a gold and white
sanctuary on the north side of the house, only opened when there was a
large party of guests, for dancing. Most people came and went without
seeing it, and it remained shut up, as much a conjecture as the memory
of Northwick's wife. She was supposed to have been taken from him early,
to save him and his children from the mortifying consequences of one of
those romantic love-affairs in which a conscientious man had sacrificed
himself to a girl he was certain to outgrow. None of his world knew that
his fortunes had been founded upon the dowry she brought him, and upon
the stay her belief in him had always been. She was a church-member, as
such women usually are, but Northwick was really her religion; and as
there is nothing that does so much to sanctify a deity as the blind
devotion of its worshippers, Northwick was rendered at times worthy of
her faith by the intensity of it. In his sort he returned her love; he
was not the kind of man whose affections are apt to wander, perhaps
because they were few and easily kept together; perhaps because he was
really principled against letting them go astray. He was not merely true
in a passive way, but he was constant in the more positive fashion. When
they began to get on in the world, and his business talent brought him
into relations with people much above them socially, he yielded to her
shrinking from the opportunities of social advancement that opened to
them, and held aloof with her. This kept him a country person in his
experiences much longer than he need have remained; and tended to that
sort of defensive secretiveness which grew more and more upon him, and
qualified his conduct in matters where there was no question of his
knowledge of the polite world. It was not until after his wife's death,
and until his daughters began to grow up into the circles where his
money and his business associations authorized them to move, that he
began to see a little of that world. Even then he left it chiefly to his
children; for himself he continued quite simply loyal to h