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.

 The door to the shop opens. It's a handsome, somewhat impoverished looking young man: the Pyncheon house lodger, Mr. Holgrave. He congratulates Hepzibah on following through with her plan. She begins to sob: "I wish I were dead, and in the old family-tomb, with all my forefathers!" . Mr. Holgrave promises that Hepzibah is doing a braver thing now than any Pyncheon woman has ever done. Hepzibah cheers up a bit, but she still thinks that "Maule's ghost" must be pleased to see what has become of the Pyncheon family. She gives Mr. Holgrave half a dozen biscuits and refuses to accept any money for them. Two working men walk past the shop. One of the men, Dixey, comments: "Who would have thought it! Old Maid Pyncheon is setting up a cent-shop" . Dixey tells his friend that there's no way Hepzibah will succeed. These little stores never work out. Hepzibah overhears this conversation and feels hurt. She broods for a bit before the shop door opens again. A little boy named Ned Higgins comes in and asks for one of the Jim Crows in the window. The House of the Seven Gables was published in 1851, long before Jim Crow laws were first passed. Here, "Jim Crow" refers to the stereotyped character.) Hepzibah feels bad asking for the kid's allowance, so she just gives him the cookie without charging him. Ned Higgins runs out of the shop without closing the door, which riles Hepzibah up. Ned Higgins comes in again and asks for the other Jim Crow in the widow. Hepzibah gives it to him, but this time she charges him for it. Hepzibah looks at the copper coin that is her first payment. Even though Hepzibah still feels that her Pyncheon relatives would be ashamed of her, she starts to get excited. She is doing something new for the first time in many years. She feels enlivened in body and in spirit. After this first success, things do not go so well. She gets several customers, but she doesn't have a lot of the things they need - yeast, tobacco, good thread, or ginger beer. Hepzibah is truly annoyed that all her customers treat her as though they are better than her - don't they know that she is a Pyncheon?! But even if she's left with a lot of rage at "the lower classes" , she also isn't happy with ladies who don't have to work. Hepzibah sees a lovely woman walking past who is plainly rich and idle. Hepzibah thinks, "Must the whole world toil, that the palms of her hands may be kept white and delicate?" . Then Hepzibah feels ashamed and asks for God's forgiveness.

