spoke, "I've about made up my mind to build on that lot." 

 "All right, Silas," said Mrs. Lapham; "I suppose you know what you're about. Don't build on it for me, that's all." 

 When she stood in the hall at home, taking off her things, she said to the girls, who were helping her, "Some day your father will get killed with that mare." 

 "Did he speed her?" asked Penelope, the elder. 

 She was named after her grandmother, who had in her turn inherited from another ancestress the name of the Homeric matron whose peculiar merits won her a place even among the Puritan Faiths, Hopes, Temperances, and Prudences. Penelope was the girl whose odd serious face had struck Bartley Hubbard in the photograph of the family group Lapham showed him on the day of the interview. Her large eyes, like her hair, were brown; they had the peculiar look of near-sighted eyes which is called mooning; her complexion was of a dark pallor. 

 Her mother did not reply to a question which might be considered already answered.  "He says he's going to build on that lot of his," she next remarked, unwinding the long veil which she had tied round her neck to hold her bonnet on. She put her hat and cloak on the hall table, to be carried upstairs later, and they all went in to tea: creamed oysters, birds, hot biscuit, two kinds of cake, and dishes of stewed and canned fruit and honey. The women dined alone at one, and the Colonel at the same hour down-town. But he liked a good hot meal when he got home in the evening. The house flared with gas; and the Colonel, before he sat down, went about shutting the registers, through which a welding heat came voluming up from the furnace. 

 "I'll be the death of that darkey YET," he said, "if he don't stop making on such a fire. The only way to get any comfort out of your furnace is to take care of it yourself." 

 "Well," answered his wife from behind the teapot, as he sat down at table with this threat, "there's nothing to prevent you, Si. And you can shovel the snow too, if you want to--till you get over to Beacon Street, anyway." 

 "I guess I can keep my own sidewalk on Beacon Street clean, if I take the notion." 

 "I should like to see you at it," retorted his wife. 

 "Well, you keep a sharp lookout, and may be you will." 

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