her--they were
all she needed, and she lived by them candidly and stoutly. That there
have been persons so little doubtful of duty helps to show us how
societies grow. A proportionately small amount of absolute conviction
about it will carry, we thus make out, a vast dead weight of mere
comparative. She was as anxious over hers indeed as if it had ever been
in question--which is a proof perhaps that being void of imagination,
when you are quite entirely void, makes scarcely more for comfort than
having too much, which only makes in a manner for a homeless freedom or
even at the worst for a questioned veracity. With a big installed
conscience there is virtue in a grain of the figurative faculty--it acts
as oil to the stiff machine.

Yet this life of straight and narrow insistences seated so clearly in
our view didn't take up all the room in the other house, the house of
the pictured, the intermittent Oliver, though of the fewer books in
general than ours, and of the finer proportions and less peopled spaces
(there were but three persons to fill them) as well as of the more
turbaned and powdered family portraits, one of these, the most antique,
a "French pastel," which must have been charming, of a young collateral
ancestor who had died on the European tour. A vast marginal range
seemed to me on the contrary to surround the adolescent nephew, who was
some three years, I judge, beyond me in age and had other horizons and
prospects than ours. No question of "Europe," for him, but a patriotic
preparation for acquaintance with the South and West, or what was then
called the West--he was to "see his own country first," winking at us
while he did so; though he was, in spite of differences, so nearly and
naturally neighbour'd and brother'd with us that the extensions of his
range and the charms of his position counted somehow as the limits and
the humilities of ours. He went neither to our schools nor to our
hotels, but hovered out of our view in some other educational air that I
can't now point to, and had in a remote part of the State a vast wild
property of his own, known as the Beaverkill, to which, so far from his
aunt's and his uncle's taking him there, he affably took them, and to
which also he vainly invited W. J. and me, pointing thereby to us,
however, though indirectly enough perhaps, the finest childish case we
were to know for the famous acceptance of the inevitable. It was
apparently not to be thought of that inste