faith in the magnitude and the endurance of the idea to which she had
sacrificed her life, and with a passionate instinct of self-preservation
she labored to fortify her position.

The preparations for the _Life_ led her through by-ways that the most
scrupulous of the previous biographers had left unexplored. She accumulated
her material with a blind animal patience unconscious of fortuitous risks.
The years stretched before her like some vast blank page spread out to
receive the record of her toil; and she had a mystic conviction that she
would not die till her work was accomplished.

The aunts, sustained by no such high purpose, withdrew in turn to their
respective divisions of the Anson "plot," and Paulina remained alone with
her task. She was forty when the book was completed. She had travelled
little in her life, and it had become more and more difficult to her to
leave the House even for a day; but the dread of entrusting her document to
a strange hand made her decide to carry it herself to the publisher. On the
way to Boston she had a sudden vision of the loneliness to which this last
parting condemned her. All her youth, all her dreams, all her renunciations
lay in that neat bundle on her knee. It was not so much her grandfather's
life as her own that she had written; and the knowledge that it would come
back to her in all the glorification of print was of no more help than, to
a mother's grief, the assurance that the lad she must part with will return
with epaulets.

She had naturally addressed herself to the firm which had published her
grandfather's works. Its founder, a personal friend of the philosopher's,
had survived the Olympian group of which he had been a subordinate member,
long enough to bestow his octogenarian approval on Paulina's pious
undertaking. But he had died soon afterward; and Miss Anson found herself