She spent long afternoons in the drawing-room staring dismally out at the sodden fields and the hills beyond, which shed sad mist. She was left very much to her own resources; her new relations rarely visited in bad weather. She gave the house the benefit of her active brain, instituting all sorts of changes which she honestly believed to be reforms. She flung a modern, flimsy feeling of culture about the staid old place--a feeling expressed by current magazines, superficial opinions, shallow daring. Jethro was pleased and invigorated by her reckless dogmatic opinions, by her dainty domestic ways. He used to watch her graceful figure flit from room to room, used to listen to her high young voice giving peremptory orders. She fascinated him. She was always changing, and the women to whom he had been accustomed all his life never changed. Each one said and did exactly what her mother had said and done before her: to be original was to break the fifth commandment. They sat round the great open hearth on wet, wild evenings. Gainah would be sewing or painfully writing out recipes in a dirty copy-book. Pamela generally had a catalogue of bulbs, a sheet of paper, and a pencil. Nancy’s gushing, incapable enthusiasm, and Mrs. Clutton’s practical knowledge of flower gardening had infected her. She already knew them well enough for that. She was full of ideas for spring bedding. “I must have a hundred early tulips,” she would say coaxingly. When Jethro, looking up from the local paper, returned indulgently, “Order what you please,” she added the hundred tulips to her list with the glee of a child. Gainah seldom said anything. She had always been a silent woman, and Pamela’s whirling, modern influence had petrified her altogether. The thin white lips hardly opened except to timidly rate the two maids, who now tossed their heads at their former tyrant. She took Pamela’s presence passively, never commenting on anything she did. But sometimes, when the girl looked up suddenly from the fascinating bulb catalogue, and found those odd eyes on her, she shivered. They were so dead--those eyes. Yet such a secret, such a terrible soul seemed to play and lurk behind them. Gainah never protested. Little by little she felt the scepter slip from her powerless hand. Little by little her life lost color. Pamela laughed at her methods, was often disgusted by her thrifty, traditional economies. She had a superior trick of saying, “My way is the correct one.” Or she would quote the domestic routine of her father’s house, in the prosperous time when they lived in a detached house with a carriage drive and stabling. She was more than a bit of snob, but Jethro knew nothing of snobbery. He approved of all she did.