would have been out of place in no ancestral hall, and
many of her friends were surprised, after her husband's death, that she
did not choose one wherein to hang it. She might have. For she was the
quintessence of that feminine product of our country at which Europe has
never ceased to wonder, and to give her history would no more account
for her than the process of manufacture explains the most delicate
of scents. Her poise, her quick detection of sham in others not so
fortunate, her absolute conviction that all things were as they ought
to be; her charity, her interest in its recipients; her smile, which was
kindness itself; her delicate features, her white skin with its natural
bloom; the grace of her movements, and her hair, which had a different
color in changing lights--such an ensemble is not to be depicted save by
a skilled hand.

The late Mr. Larrabbee's name was still printed on millions of bright
labels encircling cubes of tobacco, now manufactured by a Trust.
However, since the kind that entered Mrs. Larrabbee's house, or houses,
was all imported from Egypt or Cuba, what might have been in the nature
of an unpleasant reminder was remote from her sight, and she never drove
into the northern part of the city, where some hundreds of young women
bent all day over the cutting-machines. To enter too definitely into
Mrs. Larrabbee's history, therefore, were merely to be crude, for she is
not a lady to caricature. Her father had been a steamboat captain--once
an honoured calling in the city of her nativity--a devout Presbyterian
who believed in the most rigid simplicity. Few who remembered the
gaucheries of Captain Corington's daughter on her first presentation
to his family's friends could recognize her in the cosmopolitan Mrs.
Larrabbee. Why, with New York and London at her disposal, she elected to
remain in the Middle West, puzzled them, though they found her answer,
"that she belonged there," satisfying Grace Larrabbee's cosmopolitanism
was of that apperception that knows the value of roots, and during her
widowhood she had been thrusting them out. Mrs. Larrabbee followed by
"of" was much more important than just Mrs. Larrabbee. And she was,
moreover, genuinely attached to her roots.

Her girlhood shyness--rudeness, some called it, mistaking the effect
for the cause--had refined into a manner that might be characterized as
'difficile', though Hodder had never found her so. She liked direct men;
to discover no g