surroundings produced a sensation of shock, the room was hallowed by the
simple fact that she had lived in it for a number of years. That an
object or a custom had existed in the past appeared to her to be an
incontestible reason why it should continue to exist in the present. It
was distressing to her to be obliged to move a picture or to alter the
position of a piece of furniture, and she had worn one shape of bonnet
and one style of hairdressing, slightly modified to suit the changing
fashions, for almost twenty years. Her long pale face, her pensive blue
eyes, and her look of anxious sweetness, made a touching picture of
feminine incompetence; and yet it was from this pallid warmth, this
gentle inefficiency of soul, that the buoyant spirit of Gabriella had
sprung.

For Gabriella was the incarnation of energy. From the moment of her
birth when, in the words of her negro "mammy" she had looked "as peart
as life," she had begun her battle against the enveloping twin powers of
decay and inertia. To the intense secret mortification of her mother,
who had prayed for a second waxlike infant after the fashion of poor
Jane, she had been a notoriously ugly baby (almost as ugly as her Aunt
Becky Bollingbroke who had never married), and as she grew up, this
ugliness was barely redeemed by what Jane, in her vague way, described
as "the something else in her face." According to Cousin Jimmy, who
never recognized charm unless its manifestations were soft and purring,
this "something else" was merely "a sunny temper"; and one of the
constant afflictions of Gabriella's childhood was overhearing her mother
remark to visitors: "No, she isn't so pretty as poor Jane, but, as
Cousin Jimmy tells us, she is blessed with a sunny temper."

"Give me that ruffle, mother, and I'll whip the lace on while we're
waiting," she said now, laying aside the skirt of her Easter dress, and