ladies lived on its outskirts, as it were, in cells that left the central
fane undisturbed. The very position of the furniture had come to have a
ritual significance: the sparse ornaments were the offerings of kindred
intellects, the steel engravings by Raphael Morghen marked the Via Sacra
of a European tour, and the black-walnut desk with its bronze inkstand
modelled on the Pantheon was the altar of this bleak temple of thought.

To a child compact of enthusiasms, and accustomed to pasture them on the
scanty herbage of a new social soil, the atmosphere of the old house was
full of floating nourishment. In the compressed perspective of Paulina's
outlook it stood for a monument of ruined civilizations, and its white
portico opened on legendary distances. Its very aspect was impressive
to eyes that had first surveyed life from the jig-saw "residence" of a
raw-edged Western town. The high-ceilinged rooms, with their panelled
walls, their polished mahogany, their portraits of triple-stocked ancestors
and of ringleted "females" in crayon, furnished the child with the historic
scenery against which a young imagination constructs its vision of the
past. To other eyes the cold spotless thinly-furnished interior might have
suggested the shuttered mind of a maiden-lady who associates fresh air and
sunlight with dust and discoloration; but it is the eye which supplies the
coloring-matter, and Paulina's brimmed with the richest hues.

Nevertheless, the House did not immediately dominate her. She had her
confused out-reachings toward other centres of sensation, her vague
intuition of a heliocentric system; but the attraction of habit, the steady
pressure of example, gradually fixed her roving allegiance and she bent her
neck to the yoke. Vanity had a share in her subjugation; for it had early
been discovered that she was the only person in the family who could read
her grandfather's works. The fact that she had perused them with delight at
an age when (even presupposing a metaphysical bias) it was impossible for