"Well, here it is for you," said Hepzibah, reaching it down; but
recognizing that this pertinacious customer would not quit her On
any other terms, so long as she had a gingerbread figure in her
shop, she partly drew back her extended hand, "Where is the cent?"

The little boy had the cent ready, but, like a true-born Yankee,
would have preferred the better bargain to the worse. Looking
somewhat chagrined, he put the coin into Hepzibah's hand, and
departed, sending the second Jim Crow in quest of the former one.
The new shop-keeper dropped the first solid result of her commercial
enterprise into the till. It was done! The sordid stain of that
copper coin could never be washed away from her palm. The little
schoolboy, aided by the impish figure of the negro dancer, had wrought
an irreparable ruin. The structure of ancient aristocracy had been
demolished by him, even as if his childish gripe had torn down the
seven-gabled mansion. Now let Hepzibah turn the old Pyncheon
portraits with their faces to the wall, and take the map of her
Eastern territory to kindle the kitchen fire, and blow up the flame
with the empty breath of her ancestral traditions! What had she to
do with ancestry? Nothing; no more than with posterity! No lady,
now, but simply Hepzibah Pyncheon, a forlorn old maid, and keeper
of a cent-shop!

Nevertheless, even while she paraded these ideas somewhat
ostentatiously through her mind, it is altogether surprising what
a calmness had come over her. The anxiety and misgivings which
had tormented her, whether asleep or in melancholy day-dreams,
ever since her project began to take an aspect of solidity, had
now vanished quite away. She felt the novelty of her position,
indeed, but no longer with disturbance or affright. Now and then,