"Why are you so proud of Ebenezer?" she demanded once, scornfully.

"Why? Aren't we descended from him?"

"How many generations?"

"Seven," said Edward, promptly, emphasizing the last syllable.

Janet was quick at figures. She made a mental calculation.

"Well, you've got one hundred and twenty-seven other ancestors of
Ebenezer's time, haven't you?"

Edward was a little surprised. He had never thought of this, but his
ardour for Ebenezer remained undampened. Genealogy--his own--had become
his religion, and instead of going to church he spent his Sunday mornings
poring over papers of various degrees of discolouration, making careful
notes on the ruled block.

This consciousness of his descent from good American stock that had
somehow been deprived of its heritage, while a grievance to him, was also
a comfort. It had a compensating side, in spite of the lack of sympathy
of his daughters and his wife. Hannah Bumpus took the situation more
grimly: she was a logical projection in a new environment of the
religious fatalism of ancestors whose God was a God of vengeance. She did
not concern herself as to what all this vengeance was about; life was a
trap into which all mortals walked sooner or later, and her particular
trap had a treadmill,--a round of household duties she kept whirling with
an energy that might have made their fortunes if she had been the head of