Hermione
sorts of things to remind me of the dear dead-and-gone people I get my traditions from.
Heirlooms and portraits and things, you know.
Of course, all our own family heirlooms were destroyed in a fire years ago.
So I had to go to the antique shops for the portraits and furniture and chairs and snuff boxes and swords and fire irons and things.
I bought the loveliest old spinet—truly, a find!
I can sit down to it and imagine I am my own grandmother's grandmother, you know.
And it's wonderful to sit among those old heirlooms and feel the sense of my ancestors' personalities throbbing and pulsing all about me!
I feel, when I sit at the spinet, that my personality is truly represented by my surroundings at last.
I feel that I have at last achieved sincerity in the midst of my traditions.
And there’s a picture of the loveliest old lady… old-fashioned costume, you know, and all that… and the hair dressed in a very peculiar way….
Mamma says it’s a made-up picture—not really an antique at all—but I can just feel the personality vibrating from it.
I got it at a bargain, too.
I call her—the picture, you know—after an ancestress of mine who came to this country in the old Colonial days.
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