century, from the wooden Greek temple with a pillared facade of the
early decades to the bizarre compositions, painted generally in dark red
and yellow, with many gables and long sweeps of slanting roof, which
marked that era's close. In most cases additions had been thrown out
from time to time, ells trailing at the back, or excrescences bulging at
the sides, that were not grotesque only because there had been little in
the first effect to spoil. In more than one instance the original fabric
was altered beyond recognition; here and there a house she could
remember had altogether disappeared; a new one had replaced it that
before long might be replaced by a newer still. To Olivia the consoling
thought was precisely in this state of transition, to which rapid
vicissitude, for better or for worse, was something like a law. It made
the downfall of her own family less exceptional, less bitter, when
viewed as part of a huge impermanency, shifting from phase to phase,
with no rule to govern it but the necessities of its own development.

Until this minute it was the very element in American life she had found
most distasteful. Her inclinations, carefully fostered by her parents,
had always been for the solid, the well-ordered, the assured, evolved
from precedent to precedent till its conventions were fixed and its
doings regulated as by a code of etiquette. Now, all of a sudden, she
perceived that life in shirt-sleeves possessed certain advantages over a
well-bred existence in full dress. It allowed the strictly human
qualities an easier sort of play. Where there was no pretense at turning
to the world a smooth, impeccable social front, toil and suffering,
misfortune and disgrace, became things to be less ashamed of.
Practically every one in these unpretentious, tree-shaded houses knew
what it was to struggle upward, with many a slip backward in the process
and sometimes a crashing fall from the top. These accidents were
understood. The result was the creation of a living atmosphere, not
perhaps highly civilized, but highly sympathetic, charged with the
comprehension of human frailty, into which one could carry one's
dishonor, not wholly with equanimity, but at least with the knowledge
that such burdens were not objects for astonishment. As she descended
the hill, therefore, she felt, as she had never felt before, the
comforting assurance of being among brethren, before whom she should not
have the wearisome task of "keeping