be inconsistent with a candid reference to the early annals of any biographer.  Catherine was decidedly not clever; she was not quick with her book, nor, indeed, with anything else.  She was not abnormally deficient, and she mustered learning enough to acquit herself respectably in conversation with her contemporaries, among whom it must be avowed, however, that she occupied a secondary place.  It is well known that in New York it is possible for a young girl to occupy a primary one.  Catherine, who was extremely modest, had no desire to shine, and on most social occasions, as they are called, you would have found her lurking in the background.  She was extremely fond of her father, and very much afraid of him; she thought him the cleverest and handsomest and most celebrated of men.  The poor girl found her account so completely in the exercise of her affections that the little tremor of fear that mixed itself with her filial passion gave the thing an extra relish rather than blunted its edge.  Her deepest desire was to please him, and her conception of happiness was to know that she had succeeded in pleasing him.  She had never succeeded beyond a certain point.  Though, on the whole, he was very kind to her, she was perfectly aware of this, and to go beyond the point in question seemed to her really something to live for.  What she could not know, of course, was that she disappointed him, though on three or four occasions the Doctor had been almost frank about it.  She grew up peacefully and prosperously, but at the age of eighteen Mrs. Penniman had not made a clever woman of her.  Dr. Sloper would have liked to be proud of his daughter; but there was nothing to be proud of in poor Catherine.  There was nothing, of course, to be ashamed of; but this was not enough for the Doctor, who was a proud man and would have enjoyed being able to think of his daughter as an unusual girl.  There would have been a fitness in her being pretty and graceful, intelligent and distinguished; for her mother had been the most charming woman of her little day, and as regards her father, of course he knew his own value.  He had moments of irritation at having produced a commonplace child, and he even went so far at times as to take a certain satisfaction in the thought that his wife had not lived to find her out.  He was naturally slow in making this discovery himself, and it was not till Catherine had become a young lady grown that he regarded the matter as settled.  He gave her the benefit of a great many doubts; he was in no haste to conclude.  Mrs. Penniman frequently assured him that his daughter had a delightful nature; but he knew how to interpret this assurance.  It meant, to his sense, that Catherine was not wise enough to discover that her aunt was a goose—a limitation of mind that could not fail to be agreeable to Mrs. Penniman.  Both she and her brother, however, exaggerated the young girl’s limitations; for Catherine, though she was very fond of her aunt, and conscious of the gratitude she owed her, regarded her without a particle of that gentle dread which gave its stamp to her admiration of her father.  To her mind there was nothing of the infinite about Mrs. Penniman; Catherine saw her all at once, as it were, and was not dazzled by the apparition; whereas her father’s great faculties seemed, as they stretched away, to lose themselves in a sort of luminous vagueness, which indicated, not that they stopped, but that Catherine’s own mind ceased to follow them.

It must not be supposed that Dr. Sloper visited his disappointment upon the poor girl, or ever let her suspect that she had played him a trick.  On the contrary, for fear of being unjust to her, he did his duty with exemplary zeal, and recognised that she was a faithful and affectionate child.  Besides, he was a philosopher; he smoked a good many cigars over his disappointment, and in the fulness of time he got used to it.  He satisfied himself that he had expected nothing, though, indeed, with a certain oddity of reasoning.  “I expect nothing,” he said to himself, “so that if she gives me a surprise, it will be all clear again.  If she doesn’t, it will be no loss.”  This was about the time Catherine had reached her eighteenth year, so that it will be seen her father had not been precipitate.  At this time she seemed not only incapable of giving surprises; it was almost a question whether she could have received one—she was so quiet and irresponsive.  People who expressed themselves roughly called her stolid.  But she was irresponsive because she was shy, uncomfortably, painfully shy.  This was not always understood, and she sometimes produced an impression of insensibility.  In reality she was the softest creature in the world.

III

As a child she had promised to be tall, but when she was sixteen she ceased to grow, and her stature, like most other points in her composition, was not unusual.  She was strong, however, and properly made, and, fortunately, her health was excellent.  It has been noted that the Doctor was a philosopher, but I would not have answered for his philosophy if the poor girl had proved a sickly and suffering person.  Her appearance of health constituted her principal claim to beauty, and her clear, fresh complexion, in which white and red were very equally distributed, was, indeed, an excellent thing to see.  Her eye was small and quiet, her features were rather thick, her tresses brown and smooth.  A dull, plain girl she was called by rigorous critics—a quiet, ladylike girl by those of the more imaginative sort; but by neither class was she very elaborately discussed.  When it had been duly impressed upon her that she was a young lady—it was a good while before she could believe it—she suddenly developed a lively taste for dress: a lively taste is quite the expression to use.  I feel as if I ought to write it very small, her judgement in this matter was by no means infallible; it was liable to confusions and embarrassments.  Her great indulgence of it was really the desire of a rather inarticulate nature to manifest itself; she sought to be eloquent in her garments, and to make up for her diffidence of speech by a fine frankness of costume.  But if she expressed herself in her clothes it is certain that people were not to blame for not thinking her a witty person.  It must be added that though she had the expectation of a fortune—Dr. Sloper for a long time had been making twenty thousand dollars a year by his profession, and laying aside the half of it—the amount of money at her disposal was not greater than the allowance made to many poorer girls.  In those days in New York there were still a few altar-fires flickering in the temple of Republican simplicity, and Dr. Sloper would have been glad to see his daughter present herself, with a classic grace, as a priestess of this mild faith.  It made him fairly grimace, in private, to think that a child of his should be both ugly and overdressed.  For himself, he was fond of the good things of life, and he made a considerable use of them; but he had a dread of vulgarity, and even a theory that it was increasing in the society that surrounded him.  Moreover, the standard of luxury in the United States thirty years ago was carried by no means so high as at present, and Catherine’s clever father took the old-fashioned view of the education of young persons.  He had no particular theory on the subject; it had scarcely as yet become a necessity of self-defence to have a collection of theories.  It simply appeared to him proper and reasonable that a well-bred young woman should not carry half her fortune on her back.  Catherine’s back was a broad one, and would have carried a good deal; but to the weight of the paternal displeasure she never ventured to expose it, and our heroine was twenty years old before she treated herself, for evening wear, to a red satin gown trimmed with gold fringe; though