day might come when it would do so no
more.

It was a thought that went as quickly as it came, its only importance
being that it never caused her a shudder. If it sometimes brought matter
for reflection, it was in showing her to herself in a light in which,
she was tolerably sure, she never appeared to anybody else--as the true
child of the line of frugal forebears, of sea-scouring men and
cheese-paring women, who, during nearly two hundred years of thrift, had
put penny to penny to save the Guion competence. Standing in the
cheerful "Colonial" hall which their stinting of themselves had made it
possible to build, and which was still furnished chiefly with the
objects--a settle, a pair of cupboards, a Copley portrait, a few chairs,
some old decorative pottery--they had lived with, it afforded one more
steadying element for her bewilderment to grasp at, to feel herself
their daughter.

There was, indeed, in the very type of her beauty a hint of a carefully
calculated, unwasteful adaptation of means to ends quite in the spirit
of their sparing ways. It was a beauty achieved by nature apparently
with the surest, and yet with the slightest, expenditure of energy--a
beauty of poise, of line, of delicacy, of reserve--with nothing of the
superfluous, and little even of color, beyond a gleam of chrysoprase in
fine, gray eyes and a coppery, metallic luster in hair that otherwise
would have passed as chestnut brown. It was a beauty that came as much
from repose in inaction as from grace in movement, but of which a
noticeable trait was that it required no more to produce it in the way
of effort than in that of artifice. Through the transparent whiteness of
the skin the blue of each clearly articulated vein and the rose of each
hurrying flush counted for its utmost in the general economy of values.

It was in keeping with this restraint that in all her ways, her manners,
her dress, her speech, her pride, there should be a meticulous
simplicity. It was not the simplicity of the hedge-row any more than of
the hothouse; it was rather that of some classic flower, lavender or
crown-imperial, growing from an ancient stock in some dignified,
long-tended garden. It was thus a simplicity closely allied to
sturdiness--the inner sturdiness not inconsistent with an outward
semblance of fragility--the tenacity of strength by which the lavender
scents the summer and the crown-imperial adorns the spring, after the
severest snows.

It was dou