The Angel at the Grave

The House stood a few yards back from the elm-shaded village street,
in that semi-publicity sometimes cited as a democratic protest against
old-world standards of domestic exclusiveness. This candid exposure to
the public eye is more probably a result of the gregariousness which, in
the New England bosom, oddly coexists with a shrinking from direct social
contact; most of the inmates of such houses preferring that furtive
intercourse which is the result of observations through shuttered windows
and a categorical acquaintance with the neighboring clothes-lines. The
House, however, faced its public with a difference. For sixty years it had
written itself with a capital letter, had self-consciously squared itself
in the eye of an admiring nation. The most searching inroads of village
intimacy hardly counted in a household that opened on the universe; and a
lady whose door-bell was at any moment liable to be rung by visitors from
London or Vienna was not likely to flutter up-stairs when she observed a
neighbor "stepping over."

The solitary inmate of the Anson House owed this induration of the social
texture to the most conspicuous accident in her annals: the fact that she
was the only granddaughter of the great Orestes Anson. She had been born,
as it were, into a museum, and cradled in a glass case with a label;
the first foundations of her consciousness being built on the rock of
her grandfather's celebrity. To a little girl who acquires her earliest
knowledge of literature through a _Reader_ embellished with fragments
of her ancestor's prose, that personage necessarily fills an heroic space
in the foreground of life. To communicate with one's past through the
impressive medium of print, to have, as it were, a footing in every library
in the country, and an acknowledged kinship with that world-diffused clan,
the descendants of the great, was to be pledged to a standard of manners
that amazingly simplified the lesser relations of life. The village street
on which Paulina Anson's youth looked out led to all the capitals of
Europe; and over the roads of intercommunication unseen caravans bore back
to the elm-shaded House the tribute of an admiring world.

Fate seemed to have taken a direct share in fitting Paulina for her part as
the custodian of this historic dwelling. It had long been secretly regarded
as a "visitation" by the great man's family that he had left no son and
that his daughters were not "intellectual." The ladies themselves were the
first to lament their deficiency, to own that nature had denied them the
gift of making the most of their opportunities. A profound veneration for
their parent and an unswerving faith in his doctrines had not amended their
congenital incapacity