prompt:
Chapter: MISS HEPZIBAH PYNCHEON sat in the oaken elbow-chair, with her hands
over her face, giving way to that heavy down-sinking of the heart which
most persons have experienced, when the image of hope itself seems
ponderously moulded of lead, on the eve of an enterprise at once
doubtful and momentous.  She was suddenly startled by the tinkling
alarum--high, sharp, and irregular--of a little bell.  The maiden lady
arose upon her feet, as pale as a ghost at cock-crow; for she was an
enslaved spirit, and this the talisman to which she owed obedience.
This little bell,--to speak in plainer terms,--being fastened over the
shop-door, was so contrived as to vibrate by means of a steel spring,
    and thus convey notice to the inner regions of the house when any
    customer should cross the threshold.  Its ugly and spiteful little din
    (heard now for the first time, perhaps, since Hepzibah's periwigged
     predecessor had retired from trade) at once set every nerve of her body
    in responsive and tumultuous vibration.  The crisis was upon her! Her
    first customer was at the door!

    Without giving herself time for a second thought, she rushed into the
    shop, pale, wild, desperate in gesture and expression, scowling
    portentously, and looking far better qualified to do fierce battle with
    a housebreaker than to stand smiling behind the counter, bartering
    small wares for a copper recompense.  Any ordinary customer, indeed,
    would have turned his back and fled.  And yet there was nothing fierce
    in Hepzibah's poor old heart; nor had she, at the moment, a single
    bitter thought against the world at large, or one individual man or
    woman.  She wished them all well, but wished, too, that she herself
    were done with them, and in her quiet grave.

    The applicant, by this time, stood within the doorway.  Coming freshly,
    as he did, out of the morning light, he appeared to have brought some
    of its cheery influences into the shop along with him.  It was a
    slender young man, not more than one or two and twenty years old, with
    rather a grave and thoughtful expression for his years, but likewise a
    springy alacrity and vigor.  These qualities were not only perceptible,
    physically, in his make and motions, but made themselves felt almost
    immediately in his character.  A brown beard, not too silken in its
    texture, fringed his chin, but as yet without completely hiding it; he
    wore a short mustache, too, and his dark, high-featured countenance
    looked all the better for these natural ornaments.  As for his dress,
    it was of the simplest kind; a summer sack of cheap and ordinary
    material, thin checkered pantaloons, and a straw hat, by no means of
    the finest braid.  Oak Hall might have supplied his entire equipment.
    He was chiefly marked as a gentleman--if such, indeed, he made any
    claim to be--by the rather remarkable whiteness and nicety of his clean
    linen.

    He met the scowl of old Hepzibah without apparent alarm, as having
    heretofore encountered it and found it harmless.

    "So, my dear Miss Pyncheon," said the daguerreotypist,--for it was that
    sole other occupant of the seven-gabled mansion,--"I am glad to see
    that you have not shrunk from your good purpose.  I merely look in to
    offer my best wishes, and to ask if I can assist you any further in
    your preparations."

    People in difficulty and distress, or in any manner at odds with the
    world, can endure a vast amount of harsh treatment, and perhaps be only
    the stronger for it; whereas they give way at once before the simplest
    expression of what they perceive to be genuine sympathy.  So it proved
    with poor Hepzibah; for, when she saw the young man's smile,--looking
    so much the brighter on a thoughtful face,--and heard his kindly tone,
    she broke first into a hysteric giggle and then began to sob.

    "Ah, Mr. Holgrave," cried she, as soon as she could speak, "I never can
    go through with it! Never, never, never! I wish I were dead, and in the
    old family tomb, with all my forefathers! With my father, and my
    mother, and my sister!  Yes, and with my brother, who had far better
    find me there than here! The world is too chill and hard,--and I am too
    old, and too feeble, and too hopeless!"

    "Oh, believe me, Miss Hepzibah," said the young man quietly, "these
    feelings will not trouble you any longer, after you are once fairly in
    the midst of your enterprise.  They are unavoidable at this moment,
    standing, as you do, on the outer verge of your long seclusion, and
    peopling the world with ugly shapes, which you will soon find to be as
    unreal as the giants and ogres of a child's story-book.  I find nothing
    so singular in life, as that everything appears to lose its substance
    the instant one actually grapples with it.  So it will be with what you
    think so terrible."

    "But I am a woman!" said Hepzibah piteously.  "I was going to say, a
    lady,--but I consider that as past."

    "Well; no matter if it be past!" answered the artist, a strange gleam
    of half-hidden sarcasm flashing through the kindliness of his manner.
    "Let it go! You are the better without it.  I speak frankly, my dear
    Miss Pyncheon!--for are we not friends? I look upon this as one of the
    fortunate days of your life.  It ends an epoch and begins one.
    Hitherto, the life-blood has been gradually chilling in your veins as
    you sat aloof, within your circle of gentility, while the rest of the
    world was fighting out its battle with one kind of necessity or
    another.  Henceforth, you will at least have the sense of healthy and
    natural effort for a purpose, and of lending your strength be it great
    or small--to the united struggle of mankind.  This is success,--all the
    success that anybody meets with!"

    "It is natural enough, Mr. Holgrave, that you should have ideas like
    these," rejoined Hepzibah, drawing up her gaunt figure with slightly
    offended dignity.  "You are a man, a young man, and brought up, I
    suppose, as almost everybody is nowadays, with a view to seeking your
    fortune.  But I was born a lady, and have always lived one; no matter
    in what narrowness of means, always a lady."

    "But I was not born a gentleman; neither have I lived like one," said
    Holgrave, slightly smiling; "so, my dear madam, you will hardly expect
    me to sympathize with sensibilities of this kind; though, unless I
    deceive myself, I have some imperfect comprehension of them. These
    names of gentleman and lady had a meaning, in the past history of the
    world, and conferred privileges, desirable or otherwise, on those
    entitled to bear them. In the present--and still more in the future
    condition of society-they imply, not privilege, but restriction!"

    "These are new notions," said the old gentlewoman, shaking her head.
    "I shall never understand them; neither do I wish it."

    "We will cease to speak of them, then," replied the artist, with a
    friendlier smile than his last one, "and I will leave you to feel
    whether it is not better to be a true woman than a lady.  Do you really
    think, Miss Hepzibah, that any lady of your family has ever done a more
    heroic thing, since this house was built, than you are performing in it
    to-day? Never; and if the Pyncheons had always acted so nobly, I doubt
    whether an old wizard Maule's anathema, of which you told me once,
    would have had much weight with Providence against them."

    "Ah!--no, no!" said Hepzibah, not displeased at this allusion to the
    sombre dignity of an inherited curse.  "If old Maule's ghost, or a
    descendant of his, could see me behind the counter to-day, he would
    call it the fulfillment of his worst wishes.  But I thank you for your
    kindness, Mr. Holgrave, and will do my utmost to be a good shop-keeper."

    "Pray do" said Holgrave, "and let me have the pleasure of being your
    first customer.  I am about taking a walk to the seashore, before going
    to my rooms, where I misuse Heaven's blessed sunshine by tracing out
    human features through its agency.  A few of those biscuits, dipt in
    sea-water, will be just what I need for breakfast.  What is the price
    of half a dozen?"

    "Let me be a lady a moment longer," replied Hepzibah, with a manner of
    antique stateliness to which a melancholy smile lent a kind of grace.
    She put the biscuits into his hand, but rejected the compensation.  "A
    Pyncheon must not, at all events under her forefathers' roof, receive
    money for a morsel of bread from her only friend!"

    Holgrave took his departure, leaving her, for the moment, with spirits
    not quite so much depressed.  Soon, however, they had subsided nearly
    to their former dead level.  With a beating heart, she listened to the
    footsteps of early passengers, which now began to be frequent along the
    street.  Once or twice they seemed to linger; these strangers, or
    neighbors, as the case might be, were looking at the display of toys
    and petty commodities in Hepzibah's shop-window.  She was doubly
    tortured; in part, with a sense of overwhelming shame that strange and
    unloving eyes should have the privilege of gazing, and partly because
    the idea occurred to her, with ridiculous importunity, that the window
    was not arranged so skilfully, nor nearly to so much advantage, as it
    might have been.  It seemed as if the whole fortune or failure of her
    shop might depend on the display of a different set of articles, or
    substituting a fairer apple for one which appeared to be specked.  So
    she made the change, and straightway fancied that everything was
    spoiled by it; not recognizing that it was the nervousness of the
    juncture, and her own native squeamishness as an old maid, that wrought
    all the seeming mischief.

    Anon, there was an encounter, just at the door-step, betwixt two
    laboring men, as their rough voices denoted them to be.  After some
    slight talk about their own affairs, one of them chanced to notice the
    shop-window, and directed the other's attention to it.

    "See here!" cried he; "what do you think of this? Trade seems to be
    looking up in Pyncheon Street!"

    "Well, well, this is a sight, to be sure!" exclaimed the other.  "In
    the old Pyncheon House, and underneath the Pyncheon Elm! Who would have
    thought it? Old Maid Pyncheon is setting up a cent-shop!"

    "Will she make it go, think you, Dixey?" said his friend.  "I don't
    call it a very good stand.  There's another shop just round the corner."

    "Make it go!" cried Dixey, with a most contemptuous expression, as if
    the very idea were impossible to be conceived.  "Not a bit of it! Why,
    her face--I've seen it, for I dug her garden for her one year--her face
    is enough to frighten the Old Nick himself, if he had ever so great a
    mind to trade with her.  People can't stand it, I tell you! She scowls
    dreadfully, reason or none, out of pure ugliness of temper."

    "Well, that's not so much matter," remarked the other man.  "These
    sour-tempered folks are mostly handy at business, and know pretty well
    what they are about.  But, as you say, I don't think she'll do much.
    This business of keeping cent-shops is overdone, like all other kinds
    of trade, handicraft, and bodily labor.  I know it, to my cost! My wife
    kept a cent-shop three months, and lost five dollars on her outlay."

    "Poor business!" responded Dixey, in a tone as if he were shaking his
    head,--"poor business."

    For some reason or other, not very easy to analyze, there had hardly
    been so bitter a pang in all her previous misery about the matter as
    what thrilled Hepzibah's heart on overhearing the above conversation.
    The testimony in regard to her scowl was frightfully important; it
    seemed to hold up her image wholly relieved from the false light of her
    self-partialities, and so hideous that she dared not look at it.  She
    was absurdly hurt, moreover, by the slight and idle effect that her
    setting up shop--an event of such breathless interest to
    herself--appeared to have upon the public, of which these two men were
    the nearest representatives.  A glance; a passing word or two; a coarse
    laugh; and she was doubtless forgotten before they turned the corner.
    They cared nothing for her dignity, and just as little for her
    degradation.  Then, also, the augury of ill-success, uttered from the
    sure wisdom of experience, fell upon her half-dead hope like a clod
    into a grave.  The man's wife had already tried the same experiment,
    and failed! How could the born lady--the recluse of half a lifetime,
    utterly unpractised in the world, at sixty years of age,--how could she
    ever dream of succeeding, when the hard, vulgar, keen, busy, hackneyed
    New England woman had lost five dollars on her little outlay! Success
    presented itself as an impossibility, and the hope of it as a wild
    hallucination.

    Some malevolent spirit, doing his utmost to drive Hepzibah mad,
    unrolled before her imagination a kind of panorama, representing the
    great thoroughfare of a city all astir with customers.  So many and so
    magnificent shops as there were! Groceries, toy-shops, drygoods stores,
    with their immense panes of plate-glass, their gorgeous fixtures, their
    vast and complete assortments of merchandise, in which fortunes had
    been invested; and those noble mirrors at the farther end of each
    establishment, doubling all this wealth by a brightly burnished vista
    of unrealities! On one side of the street this splendid bazaar, with a
    multitude of perfumed and glossy salesmen, smirking, smiling, bowing,
    and measuring out the goods.  On the other, the dusky old House of the
    Seven Gables, with the antiquated shop-window under its projecting
    story, and Hepzibah herself, in a gown of rusty black silk, behind the
    counter, scowling at the world as it went by!  This mighty contrast
    thrust itself forward as a fair expression of the odds against which
    she was to begin her struggle for a subsistence.  Success?
    Preposterous! She would never think of it again! The house might just
    as well be buried in an eternal fog while all other houses had the
    sunshine on them; for not a foot would ever cross the threshold, nor a
    hand so much as try the door!

    But, at this instant, the shop-bell, right over her head, tinkled as if
    it were bewitched.  The old gentlewoman's heart seemed to be attached
    to the same steel spring, for it went through a series of sharp jerks,
    in unison with the sound.  The door was thrust open, although no human
    form was perceptible on the other side of the half-window.  Hepzibah,
    nevertheless, stood at a gaze, with her hands clasped, looking very
    much as if she had summoned up an evil spirit, and were afraid, yet
    resolved, to hazard the encounter.

    "Heaven help me!" she groaned mentally.  "Now is my hour of need!"

    The door, which moved with difficulty on its creaking and rusty hinges,
    being forced quite open, a square and sturdy little urchin became
    apparent, with cheeks as red as an apple.  He was clad rather shabbily
    (but, as it seemed, more owing to his mother's carelessness than his
     father's poverty), in a blue apron, very wide and short trousers, shoes
    somewhat out at the toes, and a chip hat, with the frizzles of his
    curly hair sticking through its crevices.  A book and a small slate,
    under his arm, indicated that he was on his way to school.  He stared
    at Hepzibah a moment, as an elder customer than himself would have been
    likely enough to do, not knowing what to make of the tragic attitude
    and queer scowl wherewith she regarded him.

    "Well, child," said she, taking heart at sight of a personage so little
    formidable,--"well, my child, what did you wish for?"

    "That Jim Crow there in the window," answered the urchin, holding out a
    cent, and pointing to the gingerbread figure that had attracted his
    notice, as he loitered along to school; "the one that has not a broken
    foot."

    So Hepzibah put forth her lank arm, and, taking the effigy from the
    shop-window, delivered it to her first customer.

    "No matter for the money," said she, giving him a little push towards
    the door; for her old gentility was contumaciously squeamish at sight
    of the copper coin, and, besides, it seemed such pitiful meanness to
    take the child's pocket-money in exchange for a bit of stale
    gingerbread.  "No matter for the cent.  You are welcome to Jim Crow."

    The child, staring with round eyes at this instance of liberality,
    wholly unprecedented in his large experience of cent-shops, took the
    man of gingerbread, and quitted the premises.  No sooner had he reached
    the sidewalk (little cannibal that he was!) than Jim Crow's head was in
    his mouth.  As he had not been careful to shut the door, Hepzibah was
    at the pains of closing it after him, with a pettish ejaculation or two
    about the troublesomeness of young people, and particularly of small
    boys.  She had just placed another representative of the renowned Jim
    Crow at the window, when again the shop-bell tinkled clamorously, and
    again the door being thrust open, with its characteristic jerk and jar,
    disclosed the same sturdy little urchin who, precisely two minutes ago,
    had made his exit.  The crumbs and discoloration of the cannibal feast,
    as yet hardly consummated, were exceedingly visible about his mouth.

    "What is it now, child?" asked the maiden lady rather impatiently; "did
    you come back to shut the door?"

    "No," answered the urchin, pointing to the figure that had just been
    put up; "I want that other Jim Crow."

    "Well, here it is for you," said Hepzibah, reaching it down; but
    recognizing that this pertinacious customer would not quit her on any
    other terms, so long as she had a gingerbread figure in her shop, she
    partly drew back her extended hand, "Where is the cent?"

    The little boy had the cent ready, but, like a true-born Yankee, would
    have preferred the better bargain to the worse.  Looking somewhat
    chagrined, he put the coin into Hepzibah's hand, and departed, sending
    the second Jim Crow in quest of the former one.  The new shop-keeper
    dropped the first solid result of her commercial enterprise into the
    till.  It was done! The sordid stain of that copper coin could never be
    washed away from her palm.  The little schoolboy, aided by the impish
    figure of the negro dancer, had wrought an irreparable ruin.  The
    structure of ancient aristocracy had been demolished by him, even as if
    his childish gripe had torn down the seven-gabled mansion.  Now let
    Hepzibah turn the old Pyncheon portraits with their faces to the wall,
    and take the map of her Eastern territory to kindle the kitchen fire,
    and blow up the flame with the empty breath of her ancestral
    traditions! What had she to do with ancestry? Nothing; no more than
    with posterity! No lady, now, but simply Hepzibah Pyncheon, a forlorn
    old maid, and keeper of a cent-shop!

    Nevertheless, even while she paraded these ideas somewhat
    ostentatiously through her mind, it is altogether surprising what a
    calmness had come over her.  The anxiety and misgivings which had
    tormented her, whether asleep or in melancholy day-dreams, ever since
    her project began to take an aspect of solidity, had now vanished quite
    away.  She felt the novelty of her position, indeed, but no longer with
    disturbance or affright.  Now and then, there came a thrill of almost
    youthful enjoyment.  It was the invigorating breath of a fresh outward
    atmosphere, after the long torpor and monotonous seclusion of her life.
    So wholesome is effort! So miraculous the strength that we do not know
    of!  The healthiest glow that Hepzibah had known for years had come now
    in the dreaded crisis, when, for the first time, she had put forth her
    hand to help herself.  The little circlet of the schoolboy's copper
    coin--dim and lustreless though it was, with the small services which
    it had been doing here and there about the world--had proved a
    talisman, fragrant with good, and deserving to be set in gold and worn
    next her heart.  It was as potent, and perhaps endowed with the same
    kind of efficacy, as a galvanic ring! Hepzibah, at all events, was
    indebted to its subtile operation both in body and spirit; so much the
    more, as it inspired her with energy to get some breakfast, at which,
    still the better to keep up her courage, she allowed herself an extra
    spoonful in her infusion of black tea.

    Her introductory day of shop-keeping did not run on, however, without
    many and serious interruptions of this mood of cheerful vigor.  As a
    general rule, Providence seldom vouchsafes to mortals any more than
    just that degree of encouragement which suffices to keep them at a
    reasonably full exertion of their powers.  In the case of our old
    gentlewoman, after the excitement of new effort had subsided, the
    despondency of her whole life threatened, ever and anon, to return.  It
    was like the heavy mass of clouds which we may often see obscuring the
    sky, and making a gray twilight everywhere, until, towards nightfall,
    it yields temporarily to a glimpse of sunshine.  But, always, the
    envious cloud strives to gather again across the streak of celestial
    azure.

    Customers came in, as the forenoon advanced, but rather slowly; in some
    cases, too, it must be owned, with little satisfaction either to
    themselves or Miss Hepzibah; nor, on the whole, with an aggregate of
    very rich emolument to the till.  A little girl, sent by her mother to
    match a skein of cotton thread, of a peculiar hue, took one that the
    near-sighted old lady pronounced extremely like, but soon came running
    back, with a blunt and cross message, that it would not do, and,
    besides, was very rotten! Then, there was a pale, care-wrinkled woman,
    not old but haggard, and already with streaks of gray among her hair,
    like silver ribbons; one of those women, naturally delicate, whom you
    at once recognize as worn to death by a brute--probably a drunken
    brute--of a husband, and at least nine children.  She wanted a few
    pounds of flour, and offered the money, which the decayed gentlewoman
    silently rejected, and gave the poor soul better measure than if she
    had taken it.  Shortly afterwards, a man in a blue cotton frock, much
    soiled, came in and bought a pipe, filling the whole shop, meanwhile,
    with the hot odor of strong drink, not only exhaled in the torrid
    atmosphere of his breath, but oozing out of his entire system, like an
    inflammable gas.  It was impressed on Hepzibah's mind that this was the
    husband of the care-wrinkled woman.  He asked for a paper of tobacco;
    and as she had neglected to provide herself with the article, her
    brutal customer dashed down his newly-bought pipe and left the shop,
    muttering some unintelligible words, which had the tone and bitterness
    of a curse.  Hereupon Hepzibah threw up her eyes, unintentionally
    scowling in the face of Providence!

    No less than five persons, during the forenoon, inquired for
    ginger-beer, or root-beer, or any drink of a similar brewage, and,
    obtaining nothing of the kind, went off in an exceedingly bad humor.
    Three of them left the door open, and the other two pulled it so
    spitefully in going out that the little bell played the very deuce with
    Hepzibah's nerves.  A round, bustling, fire-ruddy housewife of the
    neighborhood burst breathless into the shop, fiercely demanding yeast;
    and when the poor gentlewoman, with her cold shyness of manner, gave
    her hot customer to understand that she did not keep the article, this
    very capable housewife took upon herself to administer a regular rebuke.

    "A cent-shop, and no yeast!" quoth she; "That will never do!  Who ever
    heard of such a thing? Your loaf will never rise, no more than mine
    will to-day.  You had better shut up shop at once."

    "Well," said Hepzibah, heaving a deep sigh, "perhaps I had!"

    Several times, moreover, besides the above instance, her lady-like
    sensibilities were seriously infringed upon by the familiar, if not
    rude, tone with which people addressed her.  They evidently considered
    themselves not merely her equals, but her patrons and superiors.  Now,
    Hepzibah had unconsciously flattered herself with the idea that there
    would be a gleam or halo, of some kind or other, about her person,
    which would insure an obeisance to her sterling gentility, or, at
    least, a tacit recognition of it.  On the other hand, nothing tortured
    her more intolerably than when this recognition was too prominently
    expressed.  To one or two rather officious offers of sympathy, her
    responses were little short of acrimonious; and, we regret to say,
    Hepzibah was thrown into a positively unchristian state of mind by the
    suspicion that one of her customers was drawn to the shop, not by any
    real need of the article which she pretended to seek, but by a wicked
    wish to stare at her.  The vulgar creature was determined to see for
    herself what sort of a figure a mildewed piece of aristocracy, after
    wasting all the bloom and much of the decline of her life apart from
    the world, would cut behind a counter.  In this particular case,
    however mechanical and innocuous it might be at other times, Hepzibah's
    contortion of brow served her in good stead.

    "I never was so frightened in my life!" said the curious customer, in
    describing the incident to one of her acquaintances.  "She's a real old
    vixen, take my word of it! She says little, to be sure; but if you
    could only see the mischief in her eye!"

    On the whole, therefore, her new experience led our decayed gentlewoman
    to very disagreeable conclusions as to the temper and manners of what
    she termed the lower classes, whom heretofore she had looked down upon
    with a gentle and pitying complaisance, as herself occupying a sphere
    of unquestionable superiority.  But, unfortunately, she had likewise to
    struggle against a bitter emotion of a directly opposite kind:  a
    sentiment of virulence, we mean, towards the idle aristocracy to which
    it had so recently been her pride to belong.  When a lady, in a
    delicate and costly summer garb, with a floating veil and gracefully
    swaying gown, and, altogether, an ethereal lightness that made you look
    at her beautifully slippered feet, to see whether she trod on the dust
    or floated in the air,--when such a vision happened to pass through
    this retired street, leaving it tenderly and delusively fragrant with
    her passage, as if a bouquet of tea-roses had been borne along,--then
    again, it is to be feared, old Hepzibah's scowl could no longer
    vindicate itself entirely on the plea of near-sightedness.

    "For what end," thought she, giving vent to that feeling of hostility
    which is the only real abasement of the poor in presence of the
    rich,--"for what good end, in the wisdom of Providence, does that woman
    live?  Must the whole world toil, that the palms of her hands may be
    kept white and delicate?"

    Then, ashamed and penitent, she hid her face.

    "May God forgive me!" said she.

    Doubtless, God did forgive her.  But, taking the inward and outward
    history of the first half-day into consideration, Hepzibah began to
    fear that the shop would prove her ruin in a moral and religious point
    of view, without contributing very essentially towards even her
    temporal welfare.

Q: Can you write an appropriate summary of the above paragraphs?
A:

completion: The First Customer: While sitting in her shop, a bell alarms Hepzibah. Her first customer arrives, a slender young man in his early twenties with a grave expression but a physical vigor. This customer, Mr. Holgrave, is the daguerreotype artist who is a boarder in the house. He wishes her well on her shop, but she cries, thinking that she can never go through with running a shop. He comforts her, telling her that she now has a purpose in life that is joined with the rest of mankind. He tells her that titles of gentleman' and lady' now mean little, implying restriction rather than privilege. He tells her that her action is the most heroic in the history of her house. She claims that, if the ghost of Matthew Maule saw what she is doing, he would consider it fulfillment of his worst wishes. He buys biscuits from her, but she refuses to accept payment from her only friend. Later, Hepzibah listens to men outside her shop, who talk about how she scowls dreadfully and dismiss the idea of a cent-shop. Her next customer is a young urchin on his way to school who buys a bit of stale gingerbread. When she refuses to charge him, he stares at her with amazement at her kindness. When he buys a second one, he pays Hepzibah her first copper coin, a single cent that, to Hepzibah, demolishes the structure of her ancient aristocracy. Customers gradually come to Hepzibah's shop, often criticizing her for lacking certain wares. This led her to disagreeable conclusions about the temper and manners of the lower classes, but also to a bitter emotion toward the idle aristocracy.


prompt:
Chapter: TOWARDS noon, Hepzibah saw an elderly gentleman, large and portly, and
of remarkably dignified demeanor, passing slowly along on the opposite
side of the white and dusty street.  On coming within the shadow of the
Pyncheon Elm, he stopt, and (taking off his hat, meanwhile, to wipe the
        perspiration from his brow) seemed to scrutinize, with especial
interest, the dilapidated and rusty-visaged House of the Seven Gables.
He himself, in a very different style, was as well worth looking at as
the house.  No better model need be sought, nor could have been found,
    of a very high order of respectability, which, by some indescribable
    magic, not merely expressed itself in his looks and gestures, but even
    governed the fashion of his garments, and rendered them all proper and
    essential to the man.  Without appearing to differ, in any tangible
    way, from other people's clothes, there was yet a wide and rich gravity
    about them that must have been a characteristic of the wearer, since it
    could not be defined as pertaining either to the cut or material.  His
    gold-headed cane, too,--a serviceable staff, of dark polished
    wood,--had similar traits, and, had it chosen to take a walk by itself,
    would have been recognized anywhere as a tolerably adequate
    representative of its master.  This character--which showed itself so
    strikingly in everything about him, and the effect of which we seek to
    convey to the reader--went no deeper than his station, habits of life,
    and external circumstances.  One perceived him to be a personage of
    marked influence and authority; and, especially, you could feel just as
    certain that he was opulent as if he had exhibited his bank account, or
    as if you had seen him touching the twigs of the Pyncheon Elm, and,
    Midas-like, transmuting them to gold.

    In his youth, he had probably been considered a handsome man; at his
    present age, his brow was too heavy, his temples too bare, his
    remaining hair too gray, his eye too cold, his lips too closely
    compressed, to bear any relation to mere personal beauty.  He would
    have made a good and massive portrait; better now, perhaps, than at any
    previous period of his life, although his look might grow positively
    harsh in the process of being fixed upon the canvas.  The artist would
    have found it desirable to study his face, and prove its capacity for
    varied expression; to darken it with a frown,--to kindle it up with a
    smile.

    While the elderly gentleman stood looking at the Pyncheon House, both
    the frown and the smile passed successively over his countenance.  His
    eye rested on the shop-window, and putting up a pair of gold-bowed
    spectacles, which he held in his hand, he minutely surveyed Hepzibah's
    little arrangement of toys and commodities.  At first it seemed not to
    please him,--nay, to cause him exceeding displeasure,--and yet, the
    very next moment, he smiled.  While the latter expression was yet on
    his lips, he caught a glimpse of Hepzibah, who had involuntarily bent
    forward to the window; and then the smile changed from acrid and
    disagreeable to the sunniest complacency and benevolence.  He bowed,
    with a happy mixture of dignity and courteous kindliness, and pursued
    his way.

    "There he is!" said Hepzibah to herself, gulping down a very bitter
    emotion, and, since she could not rid herself of it, trying to drive it
    back into her heart.  "What does he think of it, I wonder? Does it
    please him? Ah! he is looking back!"

    The gentleman had paused in the street, and turned himself half about,
    still with his eyes fixed on the shop-window.  In fact, he wheeled
    wholly round, and commenced a step or two, as if designing to enter the
    shop; but, as it chanced, his purpose was anticipated by Hepzibah's
    first customer, the little cannibal of Jim Crow, who, staring up at the
    window, was irresistibly attracted by an elephant of gingerbread.  What
    a grand appetite had this small urchin!--Two Jim Crows immediately
    after breakfast!--and now an elephant, as a preliminary whet before
    dinner.  By the time this latter purchase was completed, the elderly
    gentleman had resumed his way, and turned the street corner.

    "Take it as you like, Cousin Jaffrey,"  muttered the maiden lady, as
    she drew back, after cautiously thrusting out her head, and looking up
    and down the street,--"Take it as you like! You have seen my little
    shop-window.  Well!--what have you to say?--is not the Pyncheon House
    my own, while I'm alive?"

    After this incident, Hepzibah retreated to the back parlor, where she
    at first caught up a half-finished stocking, and began knitting at it
    with nervous and irregular jerks; but quickly finding herself at odds
    with the stitches, she threw it aside, and walked hurriedly about the
    room. At length she paused before the portrait of the stern old
    Puritan, her ancestor, and the founder of the house. In one sense, this
    picture had almost faded into the canvas, and hidden itself behind the
    duskiness of age; in another, she could not but fancy that it had been
    growing more prominent and strikingly expressive, ever since her
    earliest familiarity with it as a child. For, while the physical
    outline and substance were darkening away from the beholder's eye, the
    bold, hard, and, at the same time, indirect character of the man seemed
    to be brought out in a kind of spiritual relief. Such an effect may
    occasionally be observed in pictures of antique date. They acquire a
    look which an artist (if he have anything like the complacency of
            artists nowadays) would never dream of presenting to a patron as his
    own characteristic expression, but which, nevertheless, we at once
    recognize as reflecting the unlovely truth of a human soul.  In such
    cases, the painter's deep conception of his subject's inward traits has
    wrought itself into the essence of the picture, and is seen after the
    superficial coloring has been rubbed off by time.

    While gazing at the portrait, Hepzibah trembled under its eye.  Her
    hereditary reverence made her afraid to judge the character of the
    original so harshly as a perception of the truth compelled her to do.
    But still she gazed, because the face of the picture enabled her--at
    least, she fancied so--to read more accurately, and to a greater depth,
    the face which she had just seen in the street.

    "This is the very man!" murmured she to herself.  "Let Jaffrey Pyncheon
    smile as he will, there is that look beneath! Put on him a skull-cap,
    and a band, and a black cloak, and a Bible in one hand and a sword in
    the other,--then let Jaffrey smile as he might,--nobody would doubt
    that it was the old Pyncheon come again.  He has proved himself the
    very man to build up a new house!  Perhaps, too, to draw down a new
    curse!"

    Thus did Hepzibah bewilder herself with these fantasies of the old
    time.  She had dwelt too much alone,--too long in the Pyncheon
    House,--until her very brain was impregnated with the dry-rot of its
    timbers.  She needed a walk along the noonday street to keep her sane.

    By the spell of contrast, another portrait rose up before her, painted
    with more daring flattery than any artist would have ventured upon, but
    yet so delicately touched that the likeness remained perfect.
    Malbone's miniature, though from the same original, was far inferior to
    Hepzibah's air-drawn picture, at which affection and sorrowful
    remembrance wrought together.  Soft, mildly, and cheerfully
    contemplative, with full, red lips, just on the verge of a smile, which
    the eyes seemed to herald by a gentle kindling-up of their orbs!
    Feminine traits, moulded inseparably with those of the other sex! The
    miniature, likewise, had this last peculiarity; so that you inevitably
    thought of the original as resembling his mother, and she a lovely and
    lovable woman, with perhaps some beautiful infirmity of character, that
    made it all the pleasanter to know and easier to love her.

    "Yes," thought Hepzibah, with grief of which it was only the more
    tolerable portion that welled up from her heart to her eyelids, "they
    persecuted his mother in him! He never was a Pyncheon!"

    But here the shop-bell rang; it was like a sound from a remote
    distance,--so far had Hepzibah descended into the sepulchral depths of
    her reminiscences.  On entering the shop, she found an old man there, a
    humble resident of Pyncheon Street, and whom, for a great many years
    past, she had suffered to be a kind of familiar of the house.  He was
    an immemorial personage, who seemed always to have had a white head and
    wrinkles, and never to have possessed but a single tooth, and that a
    half-decayed one, in the front of the upper jaw.  Well advanced as
    Hepzibah was, she could not remember when Uncle Venner, as the
    neighborhood called him, had not gone up and down the street, stooping
    a little and drawing his feet heavily over the gravel or pavement.  But
    still there was something tough and vigorous about him, that not only
    kept him in daily breath, but enabled him to fill a place which would
    else have been vacant in the apparently crowded world.  To go of
    errands with his slow and shuffling gait, which made you doubt how he
    ever was to arrive anywhere; to saw a small household's foot or two of
    firewood, or knock to pieces an old barrel, or split up a pine board
    for kindling-stuff; in summer, to dig the few yards of garden ground
    appertaining to a low-rented tenement, and share the produce of his
    labor at the halves; in winter, to shovel away the snow from the
    sidewalk, or open paths to the woodshed, or along the clothes-line;
    such were some of the essential offices which Uncle Venner performed
    among at least a score of families.  Within that circle, he claimed the
    same sort of privilege, and probably felt as much warmth of interest,
    as a clergyman does in the range of his parishioners.  Not that he laid
    claim to the tithe pig; but, as an analogous mode of reverence, he went
    his rounds, every morning, to gather up the crumbs of the table and
    overflowings of the dinner-pot, as food for a pig of his own.

    In his younger days--for, after all, there was a dim tradition that he
    had been, not young, but younger--Uncle Venner was commonly regarded as
    rather deficient, than otherwise, in his wits.  In truth he had
    virtually pleaded guilty to the charge, by scarcely aiming at such
    success as other men seek, and by taking only that humble and modest
    part in the intercourse of life which belongs to the alleged
    deficiency.  But now, in his extreme old age,--whether it were that his
    long and hard experience had actually brightened him, or that his
    decaying judgment rendered him less capable of fairly measuring
    himself,--the venerable man made pretensions to no little wisdom, and
    really enjoyed the credit of it.  There was likewise, at times, a vein
    of something like poetry in him; it was the moss or wall-flower of his
    mind in its small dilapidation, and gave a charm to what might have
    been vulgar and commonplace in his earlier and middle life.  Hepzibah
    had a regard for him, because his name was ancient in the town and had
    formerly been respectable.  It was a still better reason for awarding
    him a species of familiar reverence that Uncle Venner was himself the
    most ancient existence, whether of man or thing, in Pyncheon Street,
    except the House of the Seven Gables, and perhaps the elm that
    overshadowed it.

    This patriarch now presented himself before Hepzibah, clad in an old
    blue coat, which had a fashionable air, and must have accrued to him
    from the cast-off wardrobe of some dashing clerk.  As for his trousers,
    they were of tow-cloth, very short in the legs, and bagging down
    strangely in the rear, but yet having a suitableness to his figure
    which his other garment entirely lacked.  His hat had relation to no
    other part of his dress, and but very little to the head that wore it.
    Thus Uncle Venner was a miscellaneous old gentleman, partly himself,
    but, in good measure, somebody else; patched together, too, of
    different epochs; an epitome of times and fashions.

    "So, you have really begun trade," said he,--"really begun trade!
    Well, I'm glad to see it.  Young people should never live idle in the
    world, nor old ones neither, unless when the rheumatize gets hold of
    them.  It has given me warning already; and in two or three years
    longer, I shall think of putting aside business and retiring to my
    farm.  That's yonder,--the great brick house, you know,--the workhouse,
    most folks call it; but I mean to do my work first, and go there to be
    idle and enjoy myself.  And I'm glad to see you beginning to do your
    work, Miss Hepzibah!"

    "Thank you, Uncle Venner" said Hepzibah, smiling; for she always felt
    kindly towards the simple and talkative old man.  Had he been an old
    woman, she might probably have repelled the freedom, which she now took
    in good part.  "It is time for me to begin work, indeed! Or, to speak
    the truth, I have just begun when I ought to be giving it up."

    "Oh, never say that, Miss Hepzibah!" answered the old man.  "You are a
    young woman yet.  Why, I hardly thought myself younger than I am now,
    it seems so little while ago since I used to see you playing about the
    door of the old house, quite a small child! Oftener, though, you used
    to be sitting at the threshold, and looking gravely into the street;
    for you had always a grave kind of way with you,--a grown-up air, when
    you were only the height of my knee.  It seems as if I saw you now; and
    your grandfather with his red cloak, and his white wig, and his cocked
    hat, and his cane, coming out of the house, and stepping so grandly up
    the street! Those old gentlemen that grew up before the Revolution used
    to put on grand airs.  In my young days, the great man of the town was
    commonly called King; and his wife, not Queen to be sure, but Lady.
    Nowadays, a man would not dare to be called King; and if he feels
    himself a little above common folks, he only stoops so much the lower
    to them.  I met your cousin, the Judge, ten minutes ago; and, in my old
    tow-cloth trousers, as you see, the Judge raised his hat to me, I do
    believe! At any rate, the Judge bowed and smiled!"

    "Yes," said Hepzibah, with something bitter stealing unawares into her
    tone; "my cousin Jaffrey is thought to have a very pleasant smile!"

    "And so he has" replied Uncle Venner.  "And that's rather remarkable in
    a Pyncheon; for, begging your pardon, Miss Hepzibah, they never had the
    name of being an easy and agreeable set of folks.  There was no getting
    close to them.  But Now, Miss Hepzibah, if an old man may be bold to
    ask, why don't Judge Pyncheon, with his great means, step forward, and
    tell his cousin to shut up her little shop at once? It's for your
    credit to be doing something, but it's not for the Judge's credit to
    let you!"

    "We won't talk of this, if you please, Uncle Venner," said Hepzibah
    coldly.  "I ought to say, however, that, if I choose to earn bread for
    myself, it is not Judge Pyncheon's fault.  Neither will he deserve the
    blame," added she more kindly, remembering Uncle Venner's privileges of
    age and humble familiarity, "if I should, by and by, find it convenient
    to retire with you to your farm."

    "And it's no bad place, either, that farm of mine!" cried the old man
    cheerily, as if there were something positively delightful in the
    prospect.  "No bad place is the great brick farm-house, especially for
    them that will find a good many old cronies there, as will be my case.
    I quite long to be among them, sometimes, of the winter evenings; for
    it is but dull business for a lonesome elderly man, like me, to be
    nodding, by the hour together, with no company but his air-tight stove.
    Summer or winter, there's a great deal to be said in favor of my farm!
    And, take it in the autumn, what can be pleasanter than to spend a
    whole day on the sunny side of a barn or a wood-pile, chatting with
    somebody as old as one's self; or, perhaps, idling away the time with a
    natural-born simpleton, who knows how to be idle, because even our busy
    Yankees never have found out how to put him to any use?  Upon my word,
    Miss Hepzibah, I doubt whether I've ever been so comfortable as I mean
    to be at my farm, which most folks call the workhouse.  But
    you,--you're a young woman yet,--you never need go there! Something
    still better will turn up for you.  I'm sure of it!"

    Hepzibah fancied that there was something peculiar in her venerable
    friend's look and tone; insomuch, that she gazed into his face with
    considerable earnestness, endeavoring to discover what secret meaning,
    if any, might be lurking there.  Individuals whose affairs have reached
    an utterly desperate crisis almost invariably keep themselves alive
    with hopes, so much the more airily magnificent as they have the less
    of solid matter within their grasp whereof to mould any judicious and
    moderate expectation of good.  Thus, all the while Hepzibah was
    perfecting the scheme of her little shop, she had cherished an
    unacknowledged idea that some harlequin trick of fortune would
    intervene in her favor.  For example, an uncle--who had sailed for
    India fifty years before, and never been heard of since--might yet
    return, and adopt her to be the comfort of his very extreme and
    decrepit age, and adorn her with pearls, diamonds, and Oriental shawls
    and turbans, and make her the ultimate heiress of his unreckonable
    riches.  Or the member of Parliament, now at the head of the English
    branch of the family,--with which the elder stock, on this side of the
    Atlantic, had held little or no intercourse for the last two
    centuries,--this eminent gentleman might invite Hepzibah to quit the
    ruinous House of the Seven Gables, and come over to dwell with her
    kindred at Pyncheon Hall.  But, for reasons the most imperative, she
    could not yield to his request.  It was more probable, therefore, that
    the descendants of a Pyncheon who had emigrated to Virginia, in some
    past generation, and became a great planter there,--hearing of
    Hepzibah's destitution, and impelled by the splendid generosity of
    character with which their Virginian mixture must have enriched the New
    England blood,--would send her a remittance of a thousand dollars, with
    a hint of repeating the favor annually.  Or,--and, surely, anything so
    undeniably just could not be beyond the limits of reasonable
    anticipation,--the great claim to the heritage of Waldo County might
    finally be decided in favor of the Pyncheons; so that, instead of
    keeping a cent-shop, Hepzibah would build a palace, and look down from
    its highest tower on hill, dale, forest, field, and town, as her own
    share of the ancestral territory.

    These were some of the fantasies which she had long dreamed about; and,
    aided by these, Uncle Venner's casual attempt at encouragement kindled
    a strange festal glory in the poor, bare, melancholy chambers of her
    brain, as if that inner world were suddenly lighted up with gas.  But
    either he knew nothing of her castles in the air,--as how should
    he?--or else her earnest scowl disturbed his recollection, as it might
    a more courageous man's.  Instead of pursuing any weightier topic,
    Uncle Venner was pleased to favor Hepzibah with some sage counsel in
    her shop-keeping capacity.

    "Give no credit!"--these were some of his golden maxims,--"Never take
    paper-money.  Look well to your change! Ring the silver on the
    four-pound weight! Shove back all English half-pence and base copper
    tokens, such as are very plenty about town! At your leisure hours, knit
    children's woollen socks and mittens! Brew your own yeast, and make
    your own ginger-beer!"

    And while Hepzibah was doing her utmost to digest the hard little
    pellets of his already uttered wisdom, he gave vent to his final, and
    what he declared to be his all-important advice, as follows:--

    "Put on a bright face for your customers, and smile pleasantly as you
    hand them what they ask for! A stale article, if you dip it in a good,
    warm, sunny smile, will go off better than a fresh one that you've
    scowled upon."

    To this last apothegm poor Hepzibah responded with a sigh so deep and
    heavy that it almost rustled Uncle Venner quite away, like a withered
    leaf,--as he was,--before an autumnal gale.  Recovering himself,
    however, he bent forward, and, with a good deal of feeling in his
    ancient visage, beckoned her nearer to him.

    "When do you expect him home?" whispered he.

    "Whom do you mean?" asked Hepzibah, turning pale.

    "Ah!--You don't love to talk about it," said Uncle Venner.  "Well,
    well! we'll say no more, though there's word of it all over town.  I
    remember him, Miss Hepzibah, before he could run alone!"

    During the remainder of the day, poor Hepzibah acquitted herself even
    less creditably, as a shop-keeper, than in her earlier efforts.  She
    appeared to be walking in a dream; or, more truly, the vivid life and
    reality assumed by her emotions made all outward occurrences
    unsubstantial, like the teasing phantasms of a half-conscious slumber.
    She still responded, mechanically, to the frequent summons of the
    shop-bell, and, at the demand of her customers, went prying with vague
    eyes about the shop, proffering them one article after another, and
    thrusting aside--perversely, as most of them supposed--the identical
    thing they asked for.  There is sad confusion, indeed, when the spirit
    thus flits away into the past, or into the more awful future, or, in
    any manner, steps across the spaceless boundary betwixt its own region
    and the actual world; where the body remains to guide itself as best it
    may, with little more than the mechanism of animal life.  It is like
    death, without death's quiet privilege,--its freedom from mortal care.
    Worst of all, when the actual duties are comprised in such petty
    details as now vexed the brooding soul of the old gentlewoman.  As the
    animosity of fate would have it, there was a great influx of custom in
    the course of the afternoon.  Hepzibah blundered to and fro about her
    small place of business, committing the most unheard-of errors:  now
    stringing up twelve, and now seven, tallow-candles, instead of ten to
    the pound; selling ginger for Scotch snuff, pins for needles, and
    needles for pins; misreckoning her change, sometimes to the public
    detriment, and much oftener to her own; and thus she went on, doing her
    utmost to bring chaos back again, until, at the close of the day's
    labor, to her inexplicable astonishment, she found the money-drawer
    almost destitute of coin.  After all her painful traffic, the whole
    proceeds were perhaps half a dozen coppers, and a questionable
    ninepence which ultimately proved to be copper likewise.

    At this price, or at whatever price, she rejoiced that the day had
    reached its end.  Never before had she had such a sense of the
    intolerable length of time that creeps between dawn and sunset, and of
    the miserable irksomeness of having aught to do, and of the better
    wisdom that it would be to lie down at once, in sullen resignation, and
    let life, and its toils and vexations, trample over one's prostrate
    body as they may! Hepzibah's final operation was with the little
    devourer of Jim Crow and the elephant, who now proposed to eat a camel.
    In her bewilderment, she offered him first a wooden dragoon, and next a
    handful of marbles; neither of which being adapted to his else
    omnivorous appetite, she hastily held out her whole remaining stock of
    natural history in gingerbread, and huddled the small customer out of
    the shop.  She then muffled the bell in an unfinished stocking, and put
    up the oaken bar across the door.

    During the latter process, an omnibus came to a stand-still under the
    branches of the elm-tree.  Hepzibah's heart was in her mouth.  Remote
    and dusky, and with no sunshine on all the intervening space, was that
    region of the Past whence her only guest might be expected to arrive!
    Was she to meet him now?

    Somebody, at all events, was passing from the farthest interior of the
    omnibus towards its entrance.   A gentleman alighted; but it was only
    to offer his hand to a young girl whose slender figure, nowise needing
    such assistance, now lightly descended the steps, and made an airy
    little jump from the final one to the sidewalk.  She rewarded her
    cavalier with a smile, the cheery glow of which was seen reflected on
    his own face as he reentered the vehicle.  The girl then turned towards
    the House of the Seven Gables, to the door of which, meanwhile,--not
    the shop-door, but the antique portal,--the omnibus-man had carried a
    light trunk and a bandbox.  First giving a sharp rap of the old iron
    knocker, he left his passenger and her luggage at the door-step, and
    departed.

    "Who can it be?" thought Hepzibah, who had been screwing her visual
    organs into the acutest focus of which they were capable.  "The girl
    must have mistaken the house."  She stole softly into the hall, and,
    herself invisible, gazed through the dusty side-lights of the portal at
    the young, blooming, and very cheerful face which presented itself for
    admittance into the gloomy old mansion.  It was a face to which almost
    any door would have opened of its own accord.

    The young girl, so fresh, so unconventional, and yet so orderly and
    obedient to common rules, as you at once recognized her to be, was
    widely in contrast, at that moment, with everything about her.  The
    sordid and ugly luxuriance of gigantic weeds that grew in the angle of
    the house, and the heavy projection that overshadowed her, and the
    time-worn framework of the door,--none of these things belonged to her
    sphere.  But, even as a ray of sunshine, fall into what dismal place it
    may, instantaneously creates for itself a propriety in being there, so
    did it seem altogether fit that the girl should be standing at the
    threshold.  It was no less evidently proper that the door should swing
    open to admit her.   The maiden lady herself, sternly inhospitable in
    her first purposes, soon began to feel that the door ought to be shoved
    back, and the rusty key be turned in the reluctant lock.

    "Can it be Phoebe?" questioned she within herself.  "It must be little
    Phoebe; for it can be nobody else,--and there is a look of her father
    about her, too! But what does she want here? And how like a country
    cousin, to come down upon a poor body in this way, without so much as a
    day's notice, or asking whether she would be welcome! Well; she must
    have a night's lodging, I suppose; and to-morrow the child shall go
    back to her mother."

    Phoebe, it must be understood, was that one little offshoot of the
    Pyncheon race to whom we have already referred, as a native of a rural
    part of New England, where the old fashions and feelings of
    relationship are still partially kept up.  In her own circle, it was
    regarded as by no means improper for kinsfolk to visit one another
    without invitation, or preliminary and ceremonious warning.  Yet, in
    consideration of Miss Hepzibah's recluse way of life, a letter had
    actually been written and despatched, conveying information of Phoebe's
    projected visit.  This epistle, for three or four days past, had been
    in the pocket of the penny-postman, who, happening to have no other
    business in Pyncheon Street, had not yet made it convenient to call at
    the House of the Seven Gables.

    "No--she can stay only one night," said Hepzibah, unbolting the door.
    "If Clifford were to find her here, it might disturb him!"

Q: Can you write an appropriate summary of the above paragraphs?
A:

completion: A Day Behind the Counter: A dignified elderly gentleman, large and portly, stops outside the shop. He had a gravity and an appearance of influence and authority. He does not enter the shop, however. This man, Judge Jaffrey Pyncheon, disturbs Hepzibah, his cousin. The small child who bought gingerbread early that morning instead returns and buys more food. After this incident, Hepzibah retreats to the back parlor and stares at the portrait of Colonel Pyncheon, who greatly resembles Jaffrey. She once again looks at the miniature picture, lamenting that he was persecuted. Hepzibah returns to the shop to find an elderly man known as Uncle Venner to all had entered. He was largely regarded as mentally deficient, and considered as old as the House of the Seven Gables itself. Uncle Venner congratulates Hepzibah for opening her shop, but tells her that Jaffrey should have intervened to help her before she had to enter the workforce. However, she refuses to blame her cousin. Before leaving, Uncle Venner gives her advice, including to put on a bright face for her customers. Uncle Venner asks her when he' will return home, but she does not know what he is talking about. That night, a young girl, Phoebe, comes to the house. She is part of the Pyncheon family that lives in rural New England. Before letting Phoebe in, Hepzibah vows that Phoebe can stay only one night, for if Clifford were to find her here, it would disturb him.


prompt:
Chapter: PHOEBE PYNCHEON slept, on the night of her arrival, in a chamber that
looked down on the garden of the old house.  It fronted towards the
east, so that at a very seasonable hour a glow of crimson light came
flooding through the window, and bathed the dingy ceiling and
paper-hangings in its own hue.  There were curtains to Phoebe's bed; a
dark, antique canopy, and ponderous festoons of a stuff which had been
rich, and even magnificent, in its time; but which now brooded over the
girl like a cloud, making a night in that one corner, while elsewhere
it was beginning to be day.  The morning light, however, soon stole
into the aperture at the foot of the bed, betwixt those faded curtains.
Finding the new guest there,--with a bloom on her cheeks like the
morning's own, and a gentle stir of departing slumber in her limbs, as
when an early breeze moves the foliage,--the dawn kissed her brow.  It
was the caress which a dewy maiden--such as the Dawn is,
    immortally--gives to her sleeping sister, partly from the impulse of
    irresistible fondness, and partly as a pretty hint that it is time now
    to unclose her eyes.

    At the touch of those lips of light, Phoebe quietly awoke, and, for a
    moment, did not recognize where she was, nor how those heavy curtains
    chanced to be festooned around her.  Nothing, indeed, was absolutely
    plain to her, except that it was now early morning, and that, whatever
    might happen next, it was proper, first of all, to get up and say her
    prayers.  She was the more inclined to devotion from the grim aspect of
    the chamber and its furniture, especially the tall, stiff chairs; one
    of which stood close by her bedside, and looked as if some
    old-fashioned personage had been sitting there all night, and had
    vanished only just in season to escape discovery.

    When Phoebe was quite dressed, she peeped out of the window, and saw a
    rosebush in the garden.  Being a very tall one, and of luxuriant
    growth, it had been propped up against the side of the house, and was
    literally covered with a rare and very beautiful species of white rose.
    A large portion of them, as the girl afterwards discovered, had blight
    or mildew at their hearts; but, viewed at a fair distance, the whole
    rosebush looked as if it had been brought from Eden that very summer,
    together with the mould in which it grew.  The truth was, nevertheless,
    that it had been planted by Alice Pyncheon,--she was Phoebe's
    great-great-grand-aunt,--in soil which, reckoning only its cultivation
    as a garden-plat, was now unctuous with nearly two hundred years of
    vegetable decay.  Growing as they did, however, out of the old earth,
    the flowers still sent a fresh and sweet incense up to their Creator;
nor could it have been the less pure and acceptable because Phoebe's
young breath mingled with it, as the fragrance floated past the window.
Hastening down the creaking and carpetless staircase, she found her way
into the garden, gathered some of the most perfect of the roses, and
brought them to her chamber.

Little Phoebe was one of those persons who possess, as their exclusive
patrimony, the gift of practical arrangement.  It is a kind of natural
magic that enables these favored ones to bring out the hidden
capabilities of things around them; and particularly to give a look of
comfort and habitableness to any place which, for however brief a
period, may happen to be their home.  A wild hut of underbrush, tossed
together by wayfarers through the primitive forest, would acquire the
home aspect by one night's lodging of such a woman, and would retain it
long after her quiet figure had disappeared into the surrounding shade.
No less a portion of such homely witchcraft was requisite to reclaim,
   as it were, Phoebe's waste, cheerless, and dusky chamber, which had
   been untenanted so long--except by spiders, and mice, and rats, and
   ghosts--that it was all overgrown with the desolation which watches to
   obliterate every trace of man's happier hours.  What was precisely
   Phoebe's process we find it impossible to say.  She appeared to have no
   preliminary design, but gave a touch here and another there; brought
   some articles of furniture to light and dragged others into the shadow;
   looped up or let down a window-curtain; and, in the course of half an
   hour, had fully succeeded in throwing a kindly and hospitable smile
   over the apartment.  No longer ago than the night before, it had
   resembled nothing so much as the old maid's heart; for there was
   neither sunshine nor household fire in one nor the other, and, save for
   ghosts and ghostly reminiscences, not a guest, for many years gone by,
   had entered the heart or the chamber.

   There was still another peculiarity of this inscrutable charm.  The
   bedchamber, no doubt, was a chamber of very great and varied
   experience, as a scene of human life:  the joy of bridal nights had
   throbbed itself away here; new immortals had first drawn earthly breath
   here; and here old people had died.  But--whether it were the white
   roses, or whatever the subtile influence might be--a person of delicate
   instinct would have known at once that it was now a maiden's
   bedchamber, and had been purified of all former evil and sorrow by her
   sweet breath and happy thoughts.  Her dreams of the past night, being
   such cheerful ones, had exorcised the gloom, and now haunted the
   chamber in its stead.

   After arranging matters to her satisfaction, Phoebe emerged from her
   chamber, with a purpose to descend again into the garden.  Besides the
   rosebush, she had observed several other species of flowers growing
   there in a wilderness of neglect, and obstructing one another's
   development (as is often the parallel case in human society) by their
   uneducated entanglement and confusion.  At the head of the stairs,
   however, she met Hepzibah, who, it being still early, invited her into
   a room which she would probably have called her boudoir, had her
   education embraced any such French phrase.  It was strewn about with a
   few old books, and a work-basket, and a dusty writing-desk; and had, on
   one side, a large black article of furniture, of very strange
   appearance, which the old gentlewoman told Phoebe was a harpsichord.
   It looked more like a coffin than anything else; and, indeed,--not
   having been played upon, or opened, for years,--there must have been a
   vast deal of dead music in it, stifled for want of air.  Human finger
   was hardly known to have touched its chords since the days of Alice
   Pyncheon, who had learned the sweet accomplishment of melody in Europe.

   Hepzibah bade her young guest sit down, and, herself taking a chair
   near by, looked as earnestly at Phoebe's trim little figure as if she
   expected to see right into its springs and motive secrets.

   "Cousin Phoebe," said she, at last, "I really can't see my way clear to
   keep you with me."

   These words, however, had not the inhospitable bluntness with which
   they may strike the reader; for the two relatives, in a talk before
   bedtime, had arrived at a certain degree of mutual understanding.
   Hepzibah knew enough to enable her to appreciate the circumstances
   (resulting from the second marriage of the girl's mother) which made it
   desirable for Phoebe to establish herself in another home.  Nor did she
   misinterpret Phoebe's character, and the genial activity pervading
   it,--one of the most valuable traits of the true New England
   woman,--which had impelled her forth, as might be said, to seek her
   fortune, but with a self-respecting purpose to confer as much benefit
   as she could anywise receive.  As one of her nearest kindred, she had
   naturally betaken herself to Hepzibah, with no idea of forcing herself
   on her cousin's protection, but only for a visit of a week or two,
   which might be indefinitely extended, should it prove for the happiness
   of both.

   To Hepzibah's blunt observation, therefore, Phoebe replied as frankly,
   and more cheerfully.

   "Dear cousin, I cannot tell how it will be," said she.  "But I really
   think we may suit one another much better than you suppose."

   "You are a nice girl,--I see it plainly," continued Hepzibah; "and it
   is not any question as to that point which makes me hesitate.  But,
   Phoebe, this house of mine is but a melancholy place for a young person
   to be in.  It lets in the wind and rain, and the snow, too, in the
   garret and upper chambers, in winter-time, but it never lets in the
   sunshine.  And as for myself, you see what I am,--a dismal and lonesome
   old woman (for I begin to call myself old, Phoebe), whose temper, I am
   afraid, is none of the best, and whose spirits are as bad as can be! I
   cannot make your life pleasant, Cousin Phoebe, neither can I so much as
   give you bread to eat."

   "You will find me a cheerful little body" answered Phoebe, smiling, and
   yet with a kind of gentle dignity, "and I mean to earn my bread.  You
   know I have not been brought up a Pyncheon.  A girl learns many things
   in a New England village."

   "Ah! Phoebe," said Hepzibah, sighing, "your knowledge would do but
   little for you here! And then it is a wretched thought that you should
   fling away your young days in a place like this.  Those cheeks would
   not be so rosy after a month or two.  Look at my face!" and, indeed,
   the contrast was very striking,--"you see how pale I am! It is my idea
   that the dust and continual decay of these old houses are unwholesome
   for the lungs."

   "There is the garden,--the flowers to be taken care of," observed
   Phoebe.  "I should keep myself healthy with exercise in the open air."

   "And, after all, child," exclaimed Hepzibah, suddenly rising, as if to
   dismiss the subject, "it is not for me to say who shall be a guest or
   inhabitant of the old Pyncheon House.  Its master is coming."

   "Do you mean Judge Pyncheon?" asked Phoebe in surprise.

   "Judge Pyncheon!" answered her cousin angrily.  "He will hardly cross
   the threshold while I live! No, no! But, Phoebe, you shall see the face
   of him I speak of."

   She went in quest of the miniature already described, and returned with
   it in her hand.  Giving it to Phoebe, she watched her features
   narrowly, and with a certain jealousy as to the mode in which the girl
   would show herself affected by the picture.

   "How do you like the face?" asked Hepzibah.

   "It is handsome!--it is very beautiful!" said Phoebe admiringly.  "It
   is as sweet a face as a man's can be, or ought to be.  It has something
   of a child's expression,--and yet not childish,--only one feels so very
   kindly towards him! He ought never to suffer anything.  One would bear
   much for the sake of sparing him toil or sorrow.  Who is it, Cousin
   Hepzibah?"

   "Did you never hear," whispered her cousin, bending towards her, "of
   Clifford Pyncheon?"

   "Never.  I thought there were no Pyncheons left, except yourself and
   our cousin Jaffrey," answered Phoebe.  "And yet I seem to have heard
   the name of Clifford Pyncheon.  Yes!--from my father or my mother; but
   has he not been a long while dead?"

   "Well, well, child, perhaps he has!" said Hepzibah with a sad, hollow
   laugh; "but, in old houses like this, you know, dead people are very
   apt to come back again! We shall see.  And, Cousin Phoebe, since, after
   all that I have said, your courage does not fail you, we will not part
   so soon.  You are welcome, my child, for the present, to such a home as
   your kinswoman can offer you."

   With this measured, but not exactly cold assurance of a hospitable
   purpose, Hepzibah kissed her cheek.

   They now went below stairs, where Phoebe--not so much assuming the
   office as attracting it to herself, by the magnetism of innate
   fitness--took the most active part in preparing breakfast.  The
   mistress of the house, meanwhile, as is usual with persons of her stiff
   and unmalleable cast, stood mostly aside; willing to lend her aid, yet
   conscious that her natural inaptitude would be likely to impede the
   business in hand.   Phoebe and the fire that boiled the teakettle were
   equally bright, cheerful, and efficient, in their respective offices.
   Hepzibah gazed forth from her habitual sluggishness, the necessary
   result of long solitude, as from another sphere.  She could not help
   being interested, however, and even amused, at the readiness with which
   her new inmate adapted herself to the circumstances, and brought the
   house, moreover, and all its rusty old appliances, into a suitableness
   for her purposes.  Whatever she did, too, was done without conscious
   effort, and with frequent outbreaks of song, which were exceedingly
   pleasant to the ear.  This natural tunefulness made Phoebe seem like a
   bird in a shadowy tree; or conveyed the idea that the stream of life
   warbled through her heart as a brook sometimes warbles through a
   pleasant little dell.  It betokened the cheeriness of an active
   temperament, finding joy in its activity, and, therefore, rendering it
   beautiful; it was a New England trait,--the stern old stuff of
   Puritanism with a gold thread in the web.

   Hepzibah brought out some old silver spoons with the family crest upon
   them, and a china tea-set painted over with grotesque figures of man,
   bird, and beast, in as grotesque a landscape.  These pictured people
   were odd humorists, in a world of their own,--a world of vivid
   brilliancy, so far as color went, and still unfaded, although the
   teapot and small cups were as ancient as the custom itself of
   tea-drinking.

   "Your great-great-great-great-grandmother had these cups, when she was
   married," said Hepzibah to Phoebe.  "She was a Davenport, of a good
   family.  They were almost the first teacups ever seen in the colony;
   and if one of them were to be broken, my heart would break with it.
   But it is nonsense to speak so about a brittle teacup, when I remember
   what my heart has gone through without breaking."

   The cups--not having been used, perhaps, since Hepzibah's youth--had
   contracted no small burden of dust, which Phoebe washed away with so
   much care and delicacy as to satisfy even the proprietor of this
   invaluable china.

   "What a nice little housewife you are!" exclaimed the latter, smiling,
   and at the same time frowning so prodigiously that the smile was
   sunshine under a thunder-cloud.  "Do you do other things as well?   Are
   you as good at your book as you are at washing teacups?"

   "Not quite, I am afraid," said Phoebe, laughing at the form of
   Hepzibah's question.  "But I was schoolmistress for the little children
   in our district last summer, and might have been so still."

   "Ah! 'tis all very well!" observed the maiden lady, drawing herself up.
   "But these things must have come to you with your mother's blood.  I
   never knew a Pyncheon that had any turn for them."

   It is very queer, but not the less true, that people are generally
   quite as vain, or even more so, of their deficiencies than of their
   available gifts; as was Hepzibah of this native inapplicability, so to
   speak, of the Pyncheons to any useful purpose.  She regarded it as an
   hereditary trait; and so, perhaps, it was, but unfortunately a morbid
   one, such as is often generated in families that remain long above the
   surface of society.

   Before they left the breakfast-table, the shop-bell rang sharply, and
   Hepzibah set down the remnant of her final cup of tea, with a look of
   sallow despair that was truly piteous to behold.  In cases of
   distasteful occupation, the second day is generally worse than the
   first.  We return to the rack with all the soreness of the preceding
   torture in our limbs.  At all events, Hepzibah had fully satisfied
   herself of the impossibility of ever becoming wonted to this peevishly
   obstreperous little bell.  Ring as often as it might, the sound always
   smote upon her nervous system rudely and suddenly.  And especially now,
   while, with her crested teaspoons and antique china, she was flattering
   herself with ideas of gentility, she felt an unspeakable disinclination
   to confront a customer.

   "Do not trouble yourself, dear cousin!" cried Phoebe, starting lightly
   up.  "I am shop-keeper to-day."

   "You, child!" exclaimed Hepzibah.  "What can a little country girl know
   of such matters?"

   "Oh, I have done all the shopping for the family at our village store,"
   said Phoebe.  "And I have had a table at a fancy fair, and made better
   sales than anybody.  These things are not to be learnt; they depend
   upon a knack that comes, I suppose," added she, smiling, "with one's
   mother's blood.  You shall see that I am as nice a little saleswoman as
   I am a housewife!"

   The old gentlewoman stole behind Phoebe, and peeped from the passageway
   into the shop, to note how she would manage her undertaking.  It was a
   case of some intricacy.  A very ancient woman, in a white short gown
   and a green petticoat, with a string of gold beads about her neck, and
   what looked like a nightcap on her head, had brought a quantity of yarn
   to barter for the commodities of the shop.  She was probably the very
   last person in town who still kept the time-honored spinning-wheel in
   constant revolution.  It was worth while to hear the croaking and
   hollow tones of the old lady, and the pleasant voice of Phoebe,
   mingling in one twisted thread of talk; and still better to contrast
   their figures,--so light and bloomy,--so decrepit and dusky,--with only
   the counter betwixt them, in one sense, but more than threescore years,
   in another.  As for the bargain, it was wrinkled slyness and craft
   pitted against native truth and sagacity.

   "Was not that well done?" asked Phoebe, laughing, when the customer was
   gone.

   "Nicely done, indeed, child!" answered Hepzibah.  "I could not have
   gone through with it nearly so well.  As you say, it must be a knack
   that belongs to you on the mother's side."

   It is a very genuine admiration, that with which persons too shy or too
   awkward to take a due part in the bustling world regard the real actors
   in life's stirring scenes; so genuine, in fact, that the former are
   usually fain to make it palatable to their self-love, by assuming that
   these active and forcible qualities are incompatible with others, which
   they choose to deem higher and more important.  Thus, Hepzibah was well
   content to acknowledge Phoebe's vastly superior gifts as a
   shop-keeper'--she listened, with compliant ear, to her suggestion of
   various methods whereby the influx of trade might be increased, and
   rendered profitable, without a hazardous outlay of capital.  She
   consented that the village maiden should manufacture yeast, both liquid
   and in cakes; and should brew a certain kind of beer, nectareous to the
   palate, and of rare stomachic virtues; and, moreover, should bake and
   exhibit for sale some little spice-cakes, which whosoever tasted would
   longingly desire to taste again.  All such proofs of a ready mind and
   skilful handiwork were highly acceptable to the aristocratic
   hucksteress, so long as she could murmur to herself with a grim smile,
   and a half-natural sigh, and a sentiment of mixed wonder, pity, and
   growing affection:--

   "What a nice little body she is! If she only could be a lady; too--but
   that's impossible! Phoebe is no Pyncheon.  She takes everything from
   her mother!"

   As to Phoebe's not being a lady, or whether she were a lady or no, it
   was a point, perhaps, difficult to decide, but which could hardly have
   come up for judgment at all in any fair and healthy mind.  Out of New
   England, it would be impossible to meet with a person combining so many
   ladylike attributes with so many others that form no necessary (if
           compatible) part of the character.  She shocked no canon of taste; she
   was admirably in keeping with herself, and never jarred against
   surrounding circumstances.  Her figure, to be sure,--so small as to be
   almost childlike, and so elastic that motion seemed as easy or easier
   to it than rest, would hardly have suited one's idea of a countess.
   Neither did her face--with the brown ringlets on either side, and the
   slightly piquant nose, and the wholesome bloom, and the clear shade of
   tan, and the half dozen freckles, friendly remembrances of the April
   sun and breeze--precisely give us a right to call her beautiful.  But
   there was both lustre and depth in her eyes.  She was very pretty; as
   graceful as a bird, and graceful much in the same way; as pleasant
   about the house as a gleam of sunshine falling on the floor through a
   shadow of twinkling leaves, or as a ray of firelight that dances on the
   wall while evening is drawing nigh.   Instead of discussing her claim
   to rank among ladies, it would be preferable to regard Phoebe as the
   example of feminine grace and availability combined, in a state of
   society, if there were any such, where ladies did not exist.  There it
   should be woman's office to move in the midst of practical affairs, and
   to gild them all, the very homeliest,--were it even the scouring of
   pots and kettles,--with an atmosphere of loveliness and joy.

   Such was the sphere of Phoebe.  To find the born and educated lady, on
   the other hand, we need look no farther than Hepzibah, our forlorn old
   maid, in her rustling and rusty silks, with her deeply cherished and
   ridiculous consciousness of long descent, her shadowy claims to
   princely territory, and, in the way of accomplishment, her
   recollections, it may be, of having formerly thrummed on a harpsichord,
   and walked a minuet, and worked an antique tapestry-stitch on her
   sampler.  It was a fair parallel between new Plebeianism and old
   Gentility.

   It really seemed as if the battered visage of the House of the Seven
   Gables, black and heavy-browed as it still certainly looked, must have
   shown a kind of cheerfulness glimmering through its dusky windows as
   Phoebe passed to and fro in the interior.  Otherwise, it is impossible
   to explain how the people of the neighborhood so soon became aware of
   the girl's presence.  There was a great run of custom, setting steadily
   in, from about ten o' clock until towards noon,--relaxing, somewhat, at
   dinner-time, but recommencing in the afternoon, and, finally, dying
   away a half an hour or so before the long day's sunset.  One of the
   stanchest patrons was little Ned Higgins, the devourer of Jim Crow and
   the elephant, who to-day signalized his omnivorous prowess by
   swallowing two dromedaries and a locomotive.  Phoebe laughed, as she
   summed up her aggregate of sales upon the slate; while Hepzibah, first
   drawing on a pair of silk gloves, reckoned over the sordid accumulation
   of copper coin, not without silver intermixed, that had jingled into
   the till.

   "We must renew our stock, Cousin Hepzibah!" cried the little
   saleswoman.  "The gingerbread figures are all gone, and so are those
   Dutch wooden milkmaids, and most of our other playthings.  There has
   been constant inquiry for cheap raisins, and a great cry for whistles,
   and trumpets, and jew's-harps; and at least a dozen little boys have
   asked for molasses-candy.  And we must contrive to get a peck of russet
   apples, late in the season as it is.  But, dear cousin, what an
   enormous heap of copper!  Positively a copper mountain!"

   "Well done! well done! well done!" quoth Uncle Venner, who had taken
   occasion to shuffle in and out of the shop several times in the course
   of the day.  "Here's a girl that will never end her days at my farm!
   Bless my eyes, what a brisk little soul!"

   "Yes, Phoebe is a nice girl!" said Hepzibah, with a scowl of austere
   approbation.  "But, Uncle Venner, you have known the family a great
   many years.  Can you tell me whether there ever was a Pyncheon whom she
   takes after?"

   "I don't believe there ever was," answered the venerable man.  "At any
   rate, it never was my luck to see her like among them, nor, for that
   matter, anywhere else.  I've seen a great deal of the world, not only
   in people's kitchens and back-yards but at the street-corners, and on
   the wharves, and in other places where my business calls me; and I'm
   free to say, Miss Hepzibah, that I never knew a human creature do her
   work so much like one of God's angels as this child Phoebe does!"

   Uncle Venner's eulogium, if it appear rather too high-strained for the
   person and occasion, had, nevertheless, a sense in which it was both
   subtile and true.  There was a spiritual quality in Phoebe's activity.
   The life of the long and busy day--spent in occupations that might so
   easily have taken a squalid and ugly aspect--had been made pleasant,
   and even lovely, by the spontaneous grace with which these homely
   duties seemed to bloom out of her character; so that labor, while she
   dealt with it, had the easy and flexible charm of play.  Angels do not
   toil, but let their good works grow out of them; and so did Phoebe.

   The two relatives--the young maid and the old one--found time before
   nightfall, in the intervals of trade, to make rapid advances towards
   affection and confidence.  A recluse, like Hepzibah, usually displays
   remarkable frankness, and at least temporary affability, on being
   absolutely cornered, and brought to the point of personal intercourse;
   like the angel whom Jacob wrestled with, she is ready to bless you when
   once overcome.

   The old gentlewoman took a dreary and proud satisfaction in leading
   Phoebe from room to room of the house, and recounting the traditions
   with which, as we may say, the walls were lugubriously frescoed.  She
   showed the indentations made by the lieutenant-governor's sword-hilt in
   the door-panels of the apartment where old Colonel Pyncheon, a dead
   host, had received his affrighted visitors with an awful frown.  The
   dusky terror of that frown, Hepzibah observed, was thought to be
   lingering ever since in the passageway.  She bade Phoebe step into one
   of the tall chairs, and inspect the ancient map of the Pyncheon
   territory at the eastward.  In a tract of land on which she laid her
   finger, there existed a silver mine, the locality of which was
   precisely pointed out in some memoranda of Colonel Pyncheon himself,
   but only to be made known when the family claim should be recognized by
   government.  Thus it was for the interest of all New England that the
   Pyncheons should have justice done them.  She told, too, how that there
   was undoubtedly an immense treasure of English guineas hidden somewhere
   about the house, or in the cellar, or possibly in the garden.

   "If you should happen to find it, Phoebe," said Hepzibah, glancing
   aside at her with a grim yet kindly smile, "we will tie up the
   shop-bell for good and all!"

   "Yes, dear cousin," answered Phoebe; "but, in the mean time, I hear
   somebody ringing it!"

   When the customer was gone, Hepzibah talked rather vaguely, and at
   great length, about a certain Alice Pyncheon, who had been exceedingly
   beautiful and accomplished in her lifetime, a hundred years ago.  The
   fragrance of her rich and delightful character still lingered about the
   place where she had lived, as a dried rose-bud scents the drawer where
   it has withered and perished.  This lovely Alice had met with some
   great and mysterious calamity, and had grown thin and white, and
   gradually faded out of the world.  But, even now, she was supposed to
   haunt the House of the Seven Gables, and, a great many times,--especially
   when one of the Pyncheons was to die,--she had been heard playing sadly
   and beautifully on the harpsichord.  One of these tunes, just as it had
   sounded from her spiritual touch, had been written down by an amateur of
   music; it was so exquisitely mournful that nobody, to this day, could
   bear to hear it played, unless when a great sorrow had made them know
   the still profounder sweetness of it.

   "Was it the same harpsichord that you showed me?" inquired Phoebe.

   "The very same," said Hepzibah.  "It was Alice Pyncheon's harpsichord.
   When I was learning music, my father would never let me open it.  So,
   as I could only play on my teacher's instrument, I have forgotten all
   my music long ago."

   Leaving these antique themes, the old lady began to talk about the
   daguerreotypist, whom, as he seemed to be a well-meaning and orderly
   young man, and in narrow circumstances, she had permitted to take up
   his residence in one of the seven gables.  But, on seeing more of Mr.
   Holgrave, she hardly knew what to make of him.  He had the strangest
   companions imaginable; men with long beards, and dressed in linen
   blouses, and other such new-fangled and ill-fitting garments;
   reformers, temperance lecturers, and all manner of cross-looking
   philanthropists; community-men, and come-outers, as Hepzibah believed,
   who acknowledged no law, and ate no solid food, but lived on the scent
   of other people's cookery, and turned up their noses at the fare.  As
   for the daguerreotypist, she had read a paragraph in a penny paper, the
   other day, accusing him of making a speech full of wild and
   disorganizing matter, at a meeting of his banditti-like associates.
   For her own part, she had reason to believe that he practised animal
   magnetism, and, if such things were in fashion nowadays, should be apt
   to suspect him of studying the Black Art up there in his lonesome
   chamber.

   "But, dear cousin," said Phoebe, "if the young man is so dangerous, why
   do you let him stay? If he does nothing worse, he may set the house on
   fire!"

   "Why, sometimes," answered Hepzibah, "I have seriously made it a
   question, whether I ought not to send him away.  But, with all his
   oddities, he is a quiet kind of a person, and has such a way of taking
   hold of one's mind, that, without exactly liking him (for I don't know
           enough of the young man), I should be sorry to lose sight of him
   entirely.  A woman clings to slight acquaintances when she lives so
   much alone as I do."

   "But if Mr. Holgrave is a lawless person!" remonstrated Phoebe, a part
   of whose essence it was to keep within the limits of law.

   "Oh!" said Hepzibah carelessly,--for, formal as she was, still, in her
   life's experience, she had gnashed her teeth against human law,--"I
   suppose he has a law of his own!"

Q: Can you write an appropriate summary of the above paragraphs?
A:

completion: May and November: Phoebe Pyncheon slept in a chamber that looked down on the garden of the old house. She quietly awoke and did not recognize where she was. Phoebe possessed the gift of practical arrangement, a kind of natural magic that enables people to bring out the hidden capabilities of things around them. She rearranges her room to make it more pleasant, then emerges to go into the garden. She meets Hepzibah at the head of the stairs, who tells Phoebe that she cannot stay. These words, however, were not inhospitable. Phoebe tells Hepzibah that the two may suit one another better than she supposes. Hepzibah tells Phoebe that it is not her place to say who shall be a guest of the Pyncheon House, for its master is cousin. She shows Phoebe the miniature, and tells her that it is Clifford Pyncheon. Phoebe remarks that she thought that Jaffrey and Hepzibah were the only Pyncheons not dead, and Hepzibah replies that in old houses like this, dead people are apt to come back. When a customer arrives at the shop, Phoebe offers to be the shopkeeper for the day. Phoebe proves a superior shopkeeper. She was not a lady, but she was the example of feminine grace and availability where ladies did not exist. Hepzibah wonders if there is a Pyncheon that Phoebe resembles, but Uncle Venner believes that there never was. Hepzibah gives Phoebe a tour of the house in which she explains about a number of legends , and tells Phoebe about Alice Pyncheon, who had been exceedingly beautiful and accomplished when she lived a century before. Alice met with some mysterious calamity and faded away, but she was now supposed to haunt the House of the Seven Gables by playing on the harpsichord. Phoebe did not know what to make of Mr. Holgrave; she believed that he studied some Black Art in his lonesome chamber.