nd to turn more resolutely than ever to the
companionship of duty and serious books. She was more serious and
given to routine than her elders themselves, as sometimes happened when
the daughters of New England gentlefolks were brought up wholly in the
society of their elders. At thirty-five she had more reluctance than
her mother to face an unforeseen occasion, certainly more than her
grandmother, who had preserved some cheerful inheritance of gayety and
worldliness from colonial times.

There was something about the look of the crimson silk shawl in the
front yard to make one suspect that the sober customs of the best house
in a quiet New England village were all being set at defiance, and once
when the mistress of the house came to stand in her own doorway, she
wore the pleased but somewhat apprehensive look of a guest. In these
days New England life held the necessity of much dignity and discretion
of behavior; there was the truest hospitality and good cheer in all
occasional festivities, but it was sometimes a self-conscious
hospitality, followed by an inexorable return to asceticism both of
diet and of behavior. Miss Harriet Pyne belonged to the very dullest
days of New England, those which perhaps held the most priggishness for
the learned professions, the most limited interpretation of the word
"evangelical," and the pettiest indifference to large things. The
outbreak of a desire for larger religious freedom caused at first a
most determined reaction toward formalism, especially in small and
quiet villages like Ashford, intently busy with their own concerns. It
was high time for a little leaven to begin its work, in this moment
when the great impulses of the war for liberty had died away and those
of the coming war for patriotism and a new freedom had hardly yet begun.

The dull interior, the changed life of the old house, whose former
activities seemed to have fallen sound asleep, really typified these
larger conditions, and a little leaven had made its easily recognized
appearance in the shape of a light-hearted girl. She was Miss
Harriet's young Boston cousin, Helena Vernon, who, half-amused and
half-impatient at the unnecessary sober-mindedness of her hostess and
of Ashford in general, had set herself to the difficult task of gayety.
Cousin Harriet looked on at a succession of ingenious and, on the
whole, innocent attempts at pleasure, as she might have looked on at
the frolics of a kitten who easi