her to understand them, seemed to her aunts and grandmother sure evidence
of predestination. Paulina was to be the interpreter of the oracle, and the
philosophic fumes so vertiginous to meaner minds would throw her into the
needed condition of clairvoyance. Nothing could have been more genuine than
the emotion on which this theory was based. Paulina, in fact, delighted in
her grandfather's writings. His sonorous periods, his mystic vocabulary,
his bold flights into the rarefied air of the abstract, were thrilling to
a fancy unhampered by the need of definitions. This purely verbal pleasure
was supplemented later by the excitement of gathering up crumbs of meaning
from the rhetorical board. What could have been more stimulating than
to construct the theory of a girlish world out of the fragments of this
Titanic cosmogony? Before Paulina's opinions had reached the stage when
ossification sets in their form was fatally predetermined.

The fact that Dr. Anson had died and that his apotheosis had taken
place before his young priestess's induction to the temple, made her
ministrations easier and more inspiring. There were no little personal
traits--such as the great man's manner of helping himself to salt, or the
guttural cluck that started the wheels of speech--to distract the eye
of young veneration from the central fact of his divinity. A man whom
one knows only through a crayon portrait and a dozen yellowing, tomes on
free-will and intuition is at least secure from the belittling effects of
intimacy.

Paulina thus grew up in a world readjusted to the fact of her grandfather's
greatness; and as each organism draws from its surroundings the kind of
nourishment most needful to its growth, so from this somewhat colorless
conception she absorbed warmth, brightness and variety. Paulina was the
type of woman who transmutes thought into sensation and nurses a theory in
her bosom like a child.