As for Petrina herself, who was in Boston more than of it, she is
so admirably analyzed in the chapter devoted to the task that I
am tempted to instance it as the best piece of work in the book,
though it does not make one hold one's breath like some of the
dramatic episodes: "Whatever religious instinct had been in the
family had spent itself at least two generations before her time.
She was a pagan--a tolerant, indifferent, slightly scornful
pagan.... But she was none the less a Puritan. Certain of her
ways of thought and habits of life, had survived the beliefs
which had given them birth, as an effect will often outlive its
cause. If she was a pagan, she was a serious one, a pagan with a
New England conscience."
This is mighty well said, and the like things that are said of
Petrina's sister-in-law, who has married an English title, are
mighty well, too. "She had inherited a countenance whose
expression was like the light which lingers in the sky long after
sunset--the light of some ancestral fire gone out. If in her
face there were prayers, they had been said by Pepperells and
Vassalls now sleeping in Massachusetts churchyards.
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