Cynthia was not only the minister's daughter,--distinction enough,--her
reputation for learning was spread through the country roundabout, and at
the age of twenty she had had an offer to teach school in Harwich. Once a
week in summer she went to Brampton, to the Social library there, and sat
at the feet of that Miss Lucretia Penniman of whom Brampton has ever been
so proud--Lucretia Penniman, one of the first to sound the clarion note
for the intellectual independence of American women; who wrote the "Hymn
to Coniston"; who, to the awe of her townspeople, went out into the great
world and became editress of a famous woman's journal, and knew
Longfellow and Hawthorne and Bryant. Miss Lucretia it was who started the
Brampton Social Library, and filled it with such books as both sexes
might read with profit. Never was there a stricter index than hers.
Cynthia, Miss Lucretia loved, and the training of that mind was the
pleasantest task of her life.

Curiosity as a factor has never, perhaps, been given its proper weight by
philosophers. Besides being fatal to a certain domestic animal, as an
instigating force it has brought joy and sorrow into the lives of men and
women, and made and marred careers. And curiosity now laid hold of
Cynthia Ware. Why in the world she should ever have been curious about
Jethro Bass is a mystery to many, for the two of them were as far apart
as the poles. Cynthia, of all people, took to watching the tanner's son,
and listening to the brief colloquies he had with other men at Jonah
Winch's store, when she went there to buy things for the parsonage; and
it seemed to her that Jock had not been altogether wrong, and that there
was in the man an indefinable but very compelling force. And when a woman
begins to admit that a man has force, her curiosity usually increases. On
one or two of these occasions Cynthia had been startled to find his eyes
fixed upon her, and though the feeling she had was closely akin to fear,
she found something distinctly pleasurable in it.