“As I came to the last pages of the diary, which ended abruptly on the last day of the year in Valladolid, Ruth knocked on my door and said she had come for the clothes. I was so full of the illuminating romance that I pressed her with questions. She was not so much reserved as merely indifferent, but looking at her warm young face in the uncertain candlelight I knew that therein, rather than in her speech, lay the answer to all my queries. I had seen the portraits of Amos Pennistan’s father, and of Rawdon Westmacott’s mother, daguerreotypes which hung, enlarged, on either side of the kitchen dresser, and I knew that in that generation no sign of the Spanish strain had appeared. I looked again at Ruth, at her sleek brown head, her glowing skin, her disdainful poise; looked, and was enlightened. I urged her memory. Could she recall no anecdote, dear to her father when in a mood of comfortable expansion, a family legend of her grandfather’s youth? Yes, she remembered hearing that the children had an uneasy time of it, blows and kisses distributed alternately between them, now hugged to their mother’s breast, now sent reeling across the room.... She had been gay, it seemed, that ancient woman, deliciously gay, light-hearted, generous, full of song, but of sudden and uncertain temper. But she remembered, though it was not worth the telling, that Mrs. Oliver Pennistan, in her sunniest mood, would set her children on hassocks to watch her, their backs against the wall, would take down her hair, which was long and a source of pride to her as to all Spanish women, would take her shawl from the cupboard, and, stripping off her shoes and stockings, would dance for her children, up and down, the sinuous intricacies of an Andalusian dance. I wondered what Oliver Pennistan thought, when, coming in of an evening with the mud from the turnip fields heavy on his boots, he found his wife with hair and fingers flying, dancing to the music of her own voice on the tiled floor of his ancestral kitchen?” III