dy,
frilled and furbelowed; at her feet a giant white bear, its long claws
gripping the polished floor, its jaws distended fiercely as though it
stood guard, ready to spring at him who dared to cross the charmed
circle drawn by the glowing coals. I sat in the half-darkness, for it
was late in the day, and but a single shaded lamp burned in a distant
corner. What was new in the room grew old under the wizard touch of
shadows. The mahogany bookcases stretched away on either hand, and
there were cobwebs on the diamond panes and dust on the ancient tomes.
Penelope was in her home! A hundred years ago that majestic lady in
frills and furbelows sat by this same fireplace, in that same old
carved chair, making tea, and now she smiled with great content as from
her frame she looked down on this child of her blood and bone. And the
ancestor who had gathered those dusty volumes--what of him? Two
hundred years it was, perhaps, since he had burrowed among the cobwebs,
now caressing his rare old Horace, now turning the yellow pages of his
learned treatise on astrology. He was a distinguished figure in his
wig, his velvet coat and smallclothes, and something of his features,
refined by intellectual pursuit, I read in the face that now was turned
to mine. For blood does tell. Father Time is a reckless artist,
clipping and cutting and recasting incessantly, and producing an
appalling number of failures; but now and then it would seem that he
did take some pains and, studying his models, combine the broad, low
brow of this one with another's straight and finely chiselled nose, and
still another's smoothly rounded cheek; and sometimes, in his cynical
way, he will spoil it all with a pair of coarse hands borrowed from one
of his rustic figures or the large, flat feet of some study of peasant
life, which we should have thought cast away and forgotten. In
Penelope we were offended by none of these grotesque fragments. They
must have been long since cleared out of her ancestral line. When she
raised herself after her battle with the rebellious lamp, it was with
the grace of unconscious pride, with the majesty of the lady in the
frame, but finer drawn, thanks to the thin old gentleman of the books,
who had overfed his mind and bequeathed to his descendants a legacy of
nerves.

This Penelope Blight, daintily clothed in soft black webs woven for her
by a hundred toiling human spiders, was not even the Penelope Blight of
my wildest