but the expression of a growing incredulity. The best way of proving her
faith in her grandfather was not to be afraid of his critics. She had no
notion where these shadowy antagonists lurked; for she had never heard of
the great man's doctrine being directly combated. Oblique assaults there
must have been, however, Parthian shots at the giant that none dared face;
and she thirsted to close with such assailants. The difficulty was to
find them. She began by re-reading the _Works_; thence she passed to
the writers of the same school, those whose rhetoric bloomed perennial
in _First Readers_ from which her grandfather's prose had long
since faded. Amid that clamor of far-off enthusiasms she detected no
controversial note. The little knot of Olympians held their views in common
with an early-Christian promiscuity. They were continually proclaiming
their admiration for each other, the public joining as chorus in this
guileless antiphon of praise; and she discovered no traitor in their midst.

What then had happened? Was it simply that the main current of thought
had set another way? Then why did the others survive? Why were they still
marked down as tributaries to the philosophic stream? This question carried
her still farther afield, and she pressed on with the passion of a champion
whose reluctance to know the worst might be construed into a doubt of his
cause. At length--slowly but inevitably--an explanation shaped itself.
Death had overtaken the doctrines about which her grandfather had draped
his cloudy rhetoric. They had disintegrated and been re-absorbed, adding
their little pile to the dust drifted about the mute lips of the Sphinx.
The great man's contemporaries had survived not by reason of what they
taught, but of what they were; and he, who had been the mere mask through
which they mouthed their lesson, the instrument on which their tune was
played, lay buried deep among the obsolete tools of thought.

The discovery came to Paulina suddenly. She looked up one evening from her