"Did he speed her?" asked Penelope, the elder.

She was named after her grandmother, who had in her turn
inherited from another ancestress the name of the Homeric
matron whose peculiar merits won her a place even among
the Puritan Faiths, Hopes, Temperances, and Prudences.
Penelope was the girl whose odd serious face had struck
Bartley Hubbard in the photograph of the family group Lapham
showed him on the day of the interview. Her large eyes,
like her hair, were brown; they had the peculiar look of
near-sighted eyes which is called mooning; her complexion
was of a dark pallor.

Her mother did not reply to a question which might be
considered already answered. "He says he's going to build
on that lot of his," she next remarked, unwinding the long
veil which she had tied round her neck to hold her
bonnet on. She put her hat and cloak on the hall table,
to be carried upstairs later, and they all went in to tea:
creamed oysters, birds, hot biscuit, two kinds of cake,
and dishes of stewed and canned fruit and honey.
The women dined alone at one, and the Colonel at the same
hour down-town. But he liked a good hot meal when he
got home in the evening. The house flared with gas;
and the Colonel, before he sat down, went about shutting
the registers, through which a welding heat came voluming
up from the furnace.

"I'll be the death of that darkey YET," he said,
"if he don't stop making on such a fire. The only way