An Experiment in Perfection (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III PERSIS LITCHFIELD had a decidedly judicious turn of mind that might have been explained by a look into her ancestry. Her maternal grandfather had been a chief justice of the Superior Court of Massachusetts; her father's father was a vice-chancellor; and her own father was a lawyer. At the age of forty-two, when Persis was eight years old, Mr. Litchfield had died. That his child, born two years after the death of an infant son, had not been a male, had been the supreme disappointment of his life. His ambition was to carry on the legal traditions of his own and his wife's family, to entail law in the Litchfield blood. But destiny had other purposes in view, and instead of a second son Persis had been born. However, the law of heredity had stood steadfast in mental traits, although the issue of sex had failed. And Persis had received as part of her intellectual birthright the gift (or burden) of a judicial mind. While in all matters that affected her sense of right and wrong she could be very resolute and discriminating, the feminine qualities of her mentality quite overbalanced any tendency to unpleasant strong-mindedness. Indeed, her judiciousness served her well as ballast; for from a remote ancestor on her mother's side she had inherited a masterful vein of impulse. The weak spot in the otherwise well-balanced mechanism known as Persis Litchfield was more a subtile one, and lay in the region of the soul. Fundamental faith was deplorably lacking in her. She was like some finely wrought, beautifully complex, and highly serviceable instrument that stood inert and useless for lack of some suitable lubricant. Her hope was unbounded, her charity generous; she was charmingly imaginative, and free from all taint of suspicion. Butwhenever an issue rose above the plane of th...