Page:Hermione and her little group of serious thinkers (1923, c1916).djvu/20

 Hermione sorts of things to remind me of the dear dead-and-gone people I get my traditions from.

Heirlooms and portraits and things, you know.

Of course, all our own family heirlooms were destroyed in a fire years ago.

So I had to go to the antique shops for the portraits and furniture and chairs and snuff boxes and swords and fire irons and things.

I bought the loveliest old spinet—truly, a find!

I can sit down to it and imagine I am my own grandmother's grandmother, you know.

And it's wonderful to sit among those old heirlooms and feel the sense of my ancestors' personalities throbbing and pulsing all about me!

I feel, when I sit at the spinet, that my personality is truly represented by my surroundings at last.

I feel that I have at last achieved sincerity in the midst of my traditions.

And there’s a picture of the loveliest old lady… old-fashioned costume, you know, and all that… and the hair dressed in a very peculiar way….

Mamma says it’s a made-up picture—not really an antique at all—but I can just feel the personality vibrating from it.

I got it at a bargain, too.

I call her—the picture, you know—after an ancestress of mine who came to this country in the old Colonial days. [6]