privileges of her lot were taken for granted, and certain drawbacks
made themselves very manifest. Perhaps it is a little depressing to
inherit not lands but an example of intellectual and spiritual virtue;
perhaps the conclusiveness of a great ancestor is a little
discouraging to those who run the risk of comparison with him. It
seems as if, having flowered so splendidly, nothing now remained
possible but a steady growth of good, green stalk and leaf. For these
reasons, and for others, Katharine had her moments of despondency. The
glorious past, in which men and women grew to unexampled size,
intruded too much upon the present, and dwarfed it too consistently,
to be altogether encouraging to one forced to make her experiment in
living when the great age was dead.

She was drawn to dwell upon these matters more than was natural, in
the first place owing to her mother's absorption in them, and in the
second because a great part of her time was spent in imagination with
the dead, since she was helping her mother to produce a life of the
great poet. When Katharine was seventeen or eighteen--that is to say,
some ten years ago--her mother had enthusiastically announced that
now, with a daughter to help her, the biography would soon be
published. Notices to this effect found their way into the literary
papers, and for some time Katharine worked with a sense of great pride
and achievement.

Lately, however, it had seemed to her that they were making no way at
all, and this was the more tantalizing because no one with the ghost
of a literary temperament could doubt but that they had materials for
one of the greatest biographies that has ever been written. Shelves
and boxes bulged with the precious stuff. The most private lives of
the most interesting people lay furled in yellow bundles of close-