The Hewlett homestead—a square, substantial structure of the type that has four large rooms on a floor with an L, a wide, central hall, and large fireplaces—fell at this time to the Professor and an older sister, to whom he confided the little Catharine. Without plan or premeditation the house naturally divided itself in half, Miss Hewlett instinctively occupying the northern portion where the strong sunlight did not persist in penetrating to the fading of the much-treasured Turkey carpet that was an heirloom, while the southern portion the Professor filled with his books and such simple fittings as he needed,—a high chest of drawers, and a bed that had been his mother’s, with carved spiral posts and head and foot-rail, being his only ambitious possessions; but in this part of the house the windows were never closed on the sun, that seemed to come in and transfigure and vitalize the Professor’s solitude. As Catharine grew up, she became more and more incomprehensible to her father, and kept even her very precise, ancestor-worshipping aunt in a state of constant repression by her ideas of propriety and etiquette. At twelve, she never committed the indiscretion of biting an apple, but always pared and cut it with a silver fruit-knife; at eighteen she left school and convinced her aunt that it was time for her to take charge of her father’s mending and the dusting of his study, in which she sat for an hour or so every day that he was at home, this being in the order of her preconceived ideas of duty and pride in his mental achievements, rather than from the love that makes ministry of every form a necessity. Professor Hewlett, yearning for some sign of affection, took heart at these demonstrations and prepared at once to make Catharine a partner in his simple pleasures as well as a companion in his work, going so far as to suggest that together they establish a winter home in the college town where heretofore he had merely had bachelor accommodations. To this, Catharine showed quiet, respectful, but determined opposition: she did not wish to leave her quarters at the homestead where she had built around herself an imaginary position of importance. It was one thing to chide her father for always wearing his stockings on the same feet and so poking through the big toe unnecessarily (as though any one does such things on purpose or could if he tried); to persist in sorting his letters and papers, labelling them “answered,” “unanswered,” “lecture notes,” and “proof sheets,” until he was no longer able to find anything; or to hold up her forehead for a good-night kiss,—but to change her plan of living and be submerged by numbers in a larger place was quite another, and asking too much.