a comfortable little place in Nevada Circle and the old homestead in
Hatboro'. He was fond of Washington, and robustly content with the world
as he found it there and elsewhere. If his daughter's compunctions came to
her through him, it must have been from some remoter ancestry; he was not
apparently characterised by their transmission, and probably she derived
them from her mother, who died when she was a little girl, and of whom she
had no recollection. Till he began to break, after they went abroad, he
had his own way in everything; but as men grow old or infirm they fall
into subjection to their womenkind; their rude wills yield in the suppler
insistence of the feminine purpose; they take the colour of the feminine
moods and emotions; the cycle of life completes itself where it began, in
helpless dependence upon the sex; and Rufus Kilburn did not escape the
common lot. He was often complaining and unlovely, as aged and ailing men
must be; perhaps he was usually so; but he had moments when he recognised
the beauty of his daughter's aspiration with a spiritual sympathy, which
showed that he must always have had an intellectual perception of it.
He expressed with rhetorical largeness and looseness the longing which
was not very definite in her own heart, and mingled with it a strain of
homesickness poignantly simple and direct for the places, the scenes, the
persons, the things, of his early days. As he failed more and more, his
homesickness was for natural aspects which had wholly ceased to exist
through modern changes and improvements, and for people long since dead,
whom he could find only in an illusion of that environment in some other
world. In the pathos of this situation it was easy for his daughter to keep
him ignorant of the passionate rebellion against her own ideals in which
she sometimes surprised herself. When he died, all counter-currents were
lost in the tidal revulsion of feeling which swept her to the fulfilment
of what she hoped was deepest and strongest in her nature, with shame for
what she hoped was shallowest, till that moment of repulsion in which she
saw the thickly roofed and many towered hills of Boston grow up out of the