his boots in the hall, than to rouse the drowsy echo of his dialectic. A
great man never draws so near his public as when it has become unnecessary
to read his books and is still interesting to know what he eats for
breakfast.

As recorders of their parent's domestic habits, as pious scavengers of his
waste-paper basket, the Misses Anson were unexcelled. They always had an
interesting anecdote to impart to the literary pilgrim, and the tact with
which, in later years, they intervened between the public and the growing
inaccessibility of its idol, sent away many an enthusiast satisfied to have
touched the veil before the sanctuary. Still it was felt, especially by old
Mrs. Anson, who survived her husband for some years, that Phoebe and Laura
were not worthy of their privileges. There had been a third daughter so
unworthy of hers that she had married a distant cousin, who had taken her
to live in a new Western community where the _Works of Orestes Anson_
had not yet become a part of the civic consciousness; but of this daughter
little was said, and she was tacitly understood to be excluded from the
family heritage of fame. In time, however, it appeared that the traditional
penny with which she had been cut off had been invested to unexpected
advantage; and the interest on it, when she died, returned to the Anson
House in the shape of a granddaughter who was at once felt to be what Mrs.
Anson called a "compensation." It was Mrs. Anson's firm belief that the
remotest operations of nature were governed by the centripetal force of her
husband's greatness and that Paulina's exceptional intelligence could be
explained only on the ground that she was designed to act as the guardian
of the family temple.

The House, by the time Paulina came to live in it, had already acquired
the publicity of a place of worship; not the perfumed chapel of a romantic
idolatry but the cold clean empty meeting-house of ethical enthusiasms. The