daughters early fatherless, by their brave Vermont
mother, who struck her at present as having ap
parently, almost like Columbus, worked out, all un
assisted, a conception of the other side of the globe.
She had focussed Vevey, by the light of nature, and
with extraordinary completeness, at Burlington;
after which she had embarked, sailed, landed, ex
plored and, above all, made good her presence.
She had given her daughters the five years in
Switzerland and Germany that were to leave them
ever afterwards a standard of comparison for all
cycles of Cathay, and to stamp the younger in espe
cial Susan was the younger with a character
that, as Mrs. Stringham had often had occasion,
through life, to say to herself, made all the differ
ence. It made all the difference for Mrs. String-
ham, over and over again and in the most remote
connections, that, thanks to her parent's lonely,
thrifty, hardy faith, she was a woman of the world.
There were plenty of women who were all sorts of
things that she wasn t, but who, on the other hand,
were not that, and who didn't know she was (which
she liked it relegated them still further) and didn't
know, either, how it enabled her to judge them.
She had never seen herself so much in this light as
during the actual phase of her associated, if slightly
undirected, pilgrimage; and the consciousness gave
perhaps to her plea for a pause more intensity than
she knew. The irrecoverable days had come back
to her from far off; they were part of the sense of

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p132 _ -chap- _ toc-1 _ p133w _ toc-2 _ +chap+ _ p134

v?