could change to an expression of defiance, almost fierceness.

Her mother often told her that she resembled in disposition her
paternal grandmother, who had been a woman of high temper, albeit a
great beauty.

"Charlotte, dear, you are just like your grandmother, dear Arthur's
mother, who was the worst-tempered and loveliest woman in Kentucky,"
Mrs. Carroll often remarked. She scarcely sounded the _t_ in
Kentucky, since she also was of the South, where the languid air
tends to produce elisions. The Carrolls came originally from
Kentucky, and had lived there until after the births of the two
daughters. When they were scarcely more than infants, Arthur Carroll
had experienced the petty and individual, but none the less real,
cataclysm of experience which comes to most men sooner or later. It
is the earthquake of a unit, infinitesimal, but entirely complete of
its kind, and possibly as far-reaching in its thread of consequences.
Arthur Carroll had had his palmy days, when he was working with great
profits, and, as he believed, with entire righteousness and regard to
his fellow-men, a coal-mine in the Kentucky mountains. He had
inherited it from his father, as the larger part of his patrimony.
When most of the property had been dissipated, at the time of the
civil war, the elder Carroll, who was broken by years and reverses,
used often to speak of this unimproved property of his, to his son
Arthur, who was a young boy at the time. Anna, who was a mere baby,
was the only other child.

"When you are a man, Arthur," he was fond of remarking--"when you are
a man, you must hire some money, sell what little is left here, if
necessary, and work that coal-mine. I always meant to do it myself,