But the days went on and on, and she continued to live a life as widely different from her old one as if she had been translated into another world. She sat at the front-room window, with her beautiful face looking out meekly from under her crown of curl-papers. Her mother had a theory that a long persistency in the use of the papers might produce a lasting curl, and Persis was seldom freed from them. She walked abroad on a pleasant day at a genteel pace, with a thick black embroidered veil over her face to protect her complexion. She never ran barefoot, and even her thick cowhide shoes were discarded. She wore now dainty high-heeled red morocco shoes, which made her set her feet down as delicately as some little pink-footed pigeon. All her coarse home-spun gowns were laid away in a chest. She wore now fine chintz or soft boughten wool of a week-day, and she even had a gown of silken stuff and a fine silk pelisse for Sabbath days. Going into the meeting-house beside her soberly clad parents and sisters, she looked like some gay-feathered bird which had somehow gotten into the wrong nest. All the Buckley family seemed to have united in a curious reversed tyranny towards this beautiful child. She was set up as a queen among them, whether she would or no, and she was made to take the best in their lot, whether she wanted it or not. When Persis was fourteen, her sister Rebecca went some fifty miles away to keep house for a widowed uncle and take care of his family of children. She was not needed at home, and in this way the cost of her support was saved for Persis. Submit was a dull woman, and hard work was making her duller. She broadened her patient back for her own and her sister’s burdens without a murmur, and became a contented drudge that Persis might sit in state in the front room, keeping her hands soft and white. As for Persis’s brother Ichabod, nearly all his savings were given to her, but, after all, not with any especial self-denial. This beautiful young sister represented all the faint ambition in his life; he had none left for himself, and nobody had tried to arouse any. He made perilous voyages on a whaling-ship for his living. When he came home, with his face browned and stiffened by his hard fight with the icy winds of the North Atlantic, he sat down by the fire in his father’s kitchen. Then he chewed tobacco, and never stirred if he could help it until his next voyage. At thirty, Ichabod had become as old as his father. All the dreams of youth had gone out of him, and he slumbered in the present like a very old man. Always as he sat chewing by the fire his face wore that look of set resistance, as if the lash of the North Atlantic wind still threatened it. Ever since she could remember, Persis Buckley had seen her brother sit there between his voyages, a dull reflective bulk before the hearth, like some figure-head of a stranded whaler.