The Rise of Silas Lapham quotes

Lapham looked at him silently, and then said with quiet self-respect, “

I guess if you see these things as a joke, my life won’t interest you.

”

And when I’d got the first coat on,”—Lapham called it cut—“I presume I must have set as much as half an hour, looking at it and thinking how he would have enjoyed it.

I’ve had my share of luck in this world, and I ain’t a-going to complain on my own account, but I’ve noticed that most things get along too late for most people.

It made me feel bad, and it took all the pride out my success with the paint, thinking of father. Seemed to me I might ’a taken more interest in it when he was by to see; but we’ve got to live and learn.

“No, we don’t,” said Lapham. “

Most of us marry silly little girls grown up to look like women.

”

But I ain’t a-going to stand up for every big ugly rock I come across, as if we were all a set of dumn Druids.

I say the landscape was made for man, and not man for the landscape.

”

“I took hold of the paint and rushed it—all I could,” said Lapham, with less satisfaction than he had hitherto shown in his autobiography. “But I found that I had got back to another world.

The day of small things was past, and I don’t suppose it will ever come again in this country.

My wife was at me all the time to take a partner—somebody with capital; but I couldn’t seem to bear the idea. That paint was like my own blood to me. To have anybody else concerned in it was like—well, I don’t know what.

The day of small things was past, and I don’t suppose it will ever come again in this country. My wife was at me all the time to take a partner—somebody with capital; but I couldn’t seem to bear the idea.

That paint was like my own blood to me.

To have anybody else concerned in it was like—well, I don’t know what. I saw it was the thing to do; but I tried to fight it off, and I tried to joke it off.

I believe in my paint. I believe it’s a blessing to the world. When folks come in, and kind of smell round, and ask me what I mix it with, I always say, ‘

Well, in the first place, I mix it with Faith, and after that I grind it up with the best quality of boiled linseed oil that money will buy.

’ ”

She had not the means of a wider comparison; for in Boston, with all her husband’s prosperity, they had not had a social life. Their first years there were given to careful getting on Lapham’s part, and careful saving on his wife’s.

Suddenly the money began to come so abundantly that she need not save; and then they did not know what to do with it.

A certain amount could be spent on horses, and Lapham spent it; his wife spent on rich and rather ugly clothes and a luxury of household appointments.

Perhaps they did not care a great deal to do so. They had not a conceit of themselves, but a sort of content in their own ways that one may notice in certain families.

The very strength of their mutual affection was a barrier to worldly knowledge; they dressed for one another; they equipped their house for their own satisfaction; they lived richly to themselves, not because they were selfish, but because they did not know how to do otherwise.

The elder daughter did not care for society, apparently. The younger, who was but three years younger, was not yet quite old enough to be ambitious of it. With all her wonderful beauty, she had an innocence almost vegetable.

The elder daughter did not care for society, apparently. The younger, who was but three years younger, was not yet quite old enough to be ambitious of it.

With all her wonderful beauty, she had an innocence almost vegetable.

When her beauty, which in its immaturity was crude and harsh, suddenly ripened, she bloomed and glowed with the unconsciousness of a flower; she not merely did not feel herself admired, but hardly knew herself discovered.

She took account of everything he did and said, pondering it, and trying to make out exactly what he meant, to the inflection of a syllable, the slightest movement or gesture.

In this way she began for the first time to form ideas which she had not derived from her family, and they were none the less her own because they were often mistaken.

Some of the things that he partly said, partly looked, she reported to her mother, and they talked them over, as they did everything relating to these new acquaintances, and wrought them into the novel point of view which they were acquiring. When Mrs.

“Well, I don’t know as I mean anything. But shouldn’t you like to build?

Everybody builds, at least once in a lifetime.

”

“Pshaw!” said Mrs. Lapham, deeply pleased inwardly, but not going to show it, as she would have said. “I guess you want to build there yourself.” She insensibly got a little nearer to her husband.

They liked to talk to each other in that blunt way; it is the New England way of expressing perfect confidence and tenderness.

“Well, I guess I do,” said Lapham, not insisting upon the unselfish view of the matter. “I always did like the water side of Beacon. There ain’t a sightlier place in the world for a house.

“

Yes; gentlemaning as a profession has got to play out in a generation or two.

”

“

A man can be a man on Beacon Street as well as anywhere, I guess.

”

But it all happened, and Lapham promptly developed his ideas of black walnut finish, high studding, and cornices. The architect was able to conceal the shudder which they must have sent through him.

He was skilful, as nearly all architects are, in playing upon that simple instrument Man. He began to touch Colonel Lapham’s stops.

“Oh, certainly, have the parlours high-studded. But you’ve seen some of those pretty old-fashioned country-houses, haven’t you, where the entrance-story is very low-studded?” “Yes,” Lapham assented.

“

Really beautiful things can’t go out.

They may disappear for a little while, but they must come back. It’s only the ugly things that stay out after they’ve had their day.”

It was found necessary to dig for the kitchen; at that point the original salt-marsh lay near the surface, and before they began to put in the piles for the foundation they had to pump.

The neighbourhood smelt like the hold of a ship after a three years’ voyage.

People who had cast their fortunes with the New Land went by professing not to notice it;

“No; you had better face the truth, Silas. It was no chance at all. You crowded him out. A man that had saved you! No, you had got greedy, Silas.

You had made your paint your god, and you couldn’t bear to let anybody else share in its blessings.

”

The silken texture of the marriage tie bears a daily strain of wrong and insult to which no other human relation can be subjected without lesion; and sometimes the strength that knits society together might appear to the eye of faltering faith the curse of those immediately bound by it.

Two people by no means reckless of each other’s rights and feelings, but even tender of them for the most part, may tear at each other’s heartstrings in this sacred bond with perfect impunity;

“Come and take a seat in the bay-window, ladies,” he called out to them, as they looked in at him through the ribs of the wall. He jocosely made room for them on the trestle on which he sat.

They came gingerly and vaguely forward, as young ladies do when they wish not to seem to be going to do a thing they have made up their minds to do.

When they had taken their places on their trestle, they could not help laughing with scorn, open and acceptable to their father; and Irene curled her chin up, in a little way she had, and said, “How ridiculous!” to her sister.

Instead of the grey that often dulls this complexion, her eyes were of a blue at once intense and tender, and they seemed to burn on what they looked at with a soft, lambent flame.

It was well understood by her sister and mother that her eyes always expressed a great deal more than Irene ever thought or felt; but this is not saying that she was not a very sensible girl and very honest.

The young man faltered perceptibly, and Irene came a little forward, and then there gushed from them both a smiling exchange of greeting, of which the sum was that he supposed she was out of town, and that she had not known that he had …

“Yes,” said Lapham, “

I go in for using the best rooms in your house yourself. If people come to stay with you, they can put up with the second best.

Though we don’t intend to have any second best. There ain’t going to be an unpleasant room in the whole house, from top to bottom.”

“Oh, I do. Look at mine!” She turned aside her face, so as to get a three-quarters view of her nose in the glass, and crossing her hands, with the brush in one of them, before her, regarded it judicially. “

Now, my nose started Grecian, but changed its mind before it got over the bridge, and concluded to be snub the rest of the way.

”

“It’s astonishing what a hardy breed the young club-men are,” observed his father. “

All summer through, in weather that sends the sturdiest female flying to the seashore, you find the clubs filled with young men, who don’t seem to mind the heat in the least.

”

“No, no. I understand that. And I quite agree with you. But you know I’ve always contended that the affections could be made to combine pleasure and profit.

I wouldn’t have a man marry for money⁠—that would be rather bad⁠—but I don’t see why, when it comes to falling in love, a man shouldn’t fall in love with a rich girl as easily as a poor one.

Some of the rich girls are very nice, and I should say that the chances of a quiet life with them were rather greater. They’ve always had everything, and they wouldn’t be so ambitious and uneasy. Don’t you think so?”

“Yes, there’s sense in that. But the suddenly rich are on a level with any of us nowadays. Money buys position at once. I don’t say that it isn’t all right.

The world generally knows what it’s about, and knows how to drive a bargain.

I dare say it makes the new rich pay too much. But there’s no doubt but money is to the fore now. It is the romance, the poetry of our age. It’s the thing that chiefly strikes the imagination.

Money buys position at once. I don’t say that it isn’t all right. The world generally knows what it’s about, and knows how to drive a bargain. I dare say it makes the new rich pay too much.

But there’s no doubt but money is to the fore now. It is the romance, the poetry of our age.

It’s the thing that chiefly strikes the imagination. The Englishmen who come here are more curious about the great new millionaires than about anyone else, and they respect them more. It’s all very well. I don’t complain of it.”

and you revert to us from the cowboys of Texas, and tell us to our faces that we ought to try Papa Lapham by a jury of his peers. It ought to be stopped—it ought, really.

The Bostonian who leaves Boston ought to be condemned to perpetual exile.

”

His father shook his head with an ironical sigh. “

Ah, we shall never have a real aristocracy while this plebeian reluctance to live upon a parent or a wife continues the animating spirit of our youth. It strikes at the root of the whole feudal system.

I really think you owe me an apology, Tom. I supposed you wished to marry the girl’s money, and here you are, basely seeking to go into business with her father.”

The father smoked thoughtfully. “Of course people do go into all sorts of things, as you say, and

I don’t know that one thing is more ignoble than another, if it’s decent and large enough.

In my time you would have gone into the China trade or the India trade—though I didn’t; and a little later cotton would have been your manifest destiny—though it wasn’t mine; but now a man may do almost anything. The real-estate business is pretty full.

The father rose, showing something more than his son’s height, with a very slight stoop, which the son’s figure had not. “Well,” he said, whimsically, “I admire your spirit, and I don’t deny that it is justified by necessity.

It’s a consolation to think that while I’ve been spending and enjoying, I have been preparing the noblest future for you⁠—a future of industry and self-reliance.

You never could draw, but this scheme of going into the mineral-paint business shows that you have inherited something of my feeling for colour.”

But he had plenty of money, though by this time he was married and beginning to have a family.

It was absurd for him to paint portraits for pay, and ridiculous to paint them for nothing; so he did not paint them at all.

He continued a dilettante, never quite abandoning his art, but working at it fitfully, and talking more about it than working at it. He had his theory of Titian’s method; and now and then a Bostonian insisted upon buying a picture of him.

“Why, take it off!” cried the Colonel, with instant pleasure.

There is something in human nature which causes the man in his shirtsleeves to wish all other men to appear in the same deshabille.

“I will, if you ask me after I’ve talked with you two minutes,” said the young fellow, companionably pulling up the chair offered him toward the desk where Lapham had again seated himself. “But perhaps you haven’t got two minutes to give me?”

They think it’s a great thing to get down to the beach, and they’ve all heard of the electric light on the water, and they want to see it. But you take faces now!

The astonishing thing to me is not what a face tells, but what it don’t tell.

When you think of what a man is, or a woman is, and what most of ’em have been through before they get to be thirty, it seems as if their experience would burn right through. But it don’t.

But you take faces now! The astonishing thing to me is not what a face tells, but what it don’t tell.

When you think of what a man is, or a woman is, and what most of ’em have been through before they get to be thirty, it seems as if their experience would burn right through. But it don’t.

I like to watch the couples, and try to make out which are engaged, or going to be, and which are married, or better be. But half the time I can’t make any sort of guess.

“Well,” said the Colonel, “I don’t suppose it was meant we should know what was in each other’s minds. It would take a man out of his own hands.

As long as he’s in his own hands, there’s some hopes of his doing something with himself; but if a fellow has been found out⁠—even if he hasn’t been found out to be so very bad⁠—it’s pretty much all up with him.

No, sir. I don’t want to know people through and through.”

“Well,” said the Colonel, “

I don’t suppose it was meant we should know what was in each other’s minds. It would take a man out of his own hands.

As long as he’s in his own hands, there’s some hopes of his doing something with himself; but if a fellow has been found out—even if he hasn’t been found out to be so very bad—it’s pretty much all up with him. No, sir.

But they were nearly all shrewd and friendly-looking, with an apparent readiness for the humorous intimacy native to us all. The women were dandified in dress, according to their means and taste, and the men differed from each other in degrees of indifference to it.

To a straw-hatted population, such as ours is in summer, no sort of personal dignity is possible.

We have not even the power over observers which comes from the fantasticality of an Englishman when he discards the conventional dress. In our straw hats and our serge or flannel sacks we are no more imposing than a crowd of boys.

I don’t think he would get on in a profession, and he’s instinctively kept out of everything of the kind. But he has got to do something. What shall he do? He says mineral paint, and really I don’t see why he shouldn’t.

If money is fairly and honestly earned, why should we pretend to care what it comes out of, when we don’t really care?

That superstition is exploded everywhere.”

My hardihood surprises me. Here is a son of mine whom I see reduced to making his living by a shrinkage in values. It’s very odd,” interjected Corey, “that some values should have this peculiarity of shrinking.

You never hear of values in a picture shrinking; but rents, stocks, real estate⁠—all those values shrink abominably.

Perhaps it might be argued that one should put all his values into pictures; I’ve got a good many of mine there.”

“That is what I have sometimes urged upon Tom.

I have proved to him that with economy, and strict attention to business, he need do nothing as long as he lives.

Of course he would be somewhat restricted, and it would cramp the rest of us; but it is a world of sacrifices and compromises.

The right way is for us to school ourselves to indifference. That is what the young people have to do elsewhere, and that is the only logical result of our position here.

It is absurd for us to have any feeling about what we don’t interfere with.

”

“Certainly I do.

There was a long time in my misguided youth when I supposed myself some sort of porcelain; but it’s a relief to be of the common clay, after all, and to know it. If I get broken, I can be easily replaced.

”

The door was still open, and Corey loitered a moment before it, tempted to go upstairs and fetch away some foreign letters which he had left on his desk, and which he thought he might finish up at home.

He was in love with his work, and he felt the enthusiasm for it which nothing but the work we can do well inspires in us.

He believed that he had found his place in the world, after a good deal of looking, and he had the relief, the repose, of fitting into it.

“

I think about the only difference between people in this world is that some know what they want, and some don’t.

Well, now,” said Walker, beating the bottom of his saltbox to make the salt come out, “the old man knows what he wants every time. And generally he gets it. Yes, sir, he generally gets it.

But Corey likes it. I believe the fellow would like to stick at that desk of his night and day. I don’t know where he got it. I guess it must be his grandfather, old Phillips Corey; it often skips a generation, you know.

But what I say is, a thing has got to be born in a man; and if it ain’t born in him, all the privations in the world won’t put it there, and if it is, all the college training won’t take it out.

”

“Don’t you suppose I feel as you do about it? I know just how proud you are, and I’m not going to have you do anything that will make you feel meeching afterward. You just let things take their course.

If he wants Irene, he’s going to find out some way of seeing her; and if he don’t, all the plotting and planning in the world isn’t going to make him.

”

“

Oh, nothing furnishes a room like books.

”

They both laughed again, for whatever reason or no reason, and then the young girl became sober.

To a girl everything a young man does is of significance; and if he holds a shaving down with his foot while she pokes through it with her parasol, she must ask herself what he means by it.

“They seem to be having rather a long interview with the carpenter today,” said Irene, looking vaguely toward the ceiling. She turned with polite ceremony to Corey. “I’m afraid you’re letting them keep you. You mustn’t.”

“It’s a curious thing, this thing we call civilisation,” said the elder musingly. “We think it is an affair of epochs and of nations. It’s really an affair of individuals.

One brother will be civilised and the other a barbarian.

I’ve occasionally met young girls who were so brutally, insolently, wilfully indifferent to the arts which make civilisation that they ought to have been clothed in the skins of wild beasts and gone about barefoot with clubs over their shoulders.

But that is not saying that they are civilised. All civilisation comes through literature now, especially in our country. A Greek got his civilisation by talking and looking, and in some measure a Parisian may still do it.

But we, who live remote from history and monuments, we must read or we must barbarise.

Once we were softened, if not polished, by religion; but I suspect that the pulpit counts for much less now in civilising.”

“He doesn’t seem like one to flirt with her,” she said at last. Then, after a thoughtful pause: “Irene is as good a girl as ever breathed, and she’s a perfect beauty.

But I should hate the day when a daughter of mine was married for her beauty.

”

“Oh, that won’t do.

If society took in all the people of right ideas and good sense, it would expand beyond the calling capacity of its most active members.

Even your mother’s social conscientiousness could not compass it. Society is a very different sort of thing from good sense and right ideas. It is based upon them, of course, but the airy, graceful, winning superstructure which we all know demands different qualities.

“Oh, that won’t do. If society took in all the people of right ideas and good sense, it would expand beyond the calling capacity of its most active members. Even your mother’s social conscientiousness could not compass it.

Society is a very different sort of thing from good sense and right ideas.

It is based upon them, of course, but the airy, graceful, winning superstructure which we all know demands different qualities. Have your friends got these qualities—which may be felt, but not defined?”

“Is that so?” demanded Lapham, pleased through and through. “Well, there ain’t any other way.

You’ve got to believe in a thing before you can put any heart in it.

Why, I had a partner in this thing once, along back just after the war, and he used to be always wanting to tinker with something else. ‘Why,’ says I, ‘you’ve got the best thing in God’s universe now. Why ain’t you satisfied?’

Lily, the elder of the girls, had brought back a number of studies of kelp and toadstools, with accessory rocks and rotten logs, which she would never finish up and never show anyone, knowing the slightness of their merit.

Nanny, the younger, had read a great many novels with a keen sense of their inaccuracy as representations of life, and had seen a great deal of life with a sad regret for its difference from fiction.

They were both nice girls, accomplished, well-dressed of course, and well enough looking;

“

The most that we can do is to hope for the best till we know the worst. Of course we shall make the best of the worst when it comes.

”

“It’s astonishing,” said Charles Bellingham, “how we do like the books that go for our heartstrings. And I really suppose that you can’t put a more popular thing than self-sacrifice into a novel.

We do like to see people suffering sublimely.

”

But Sewell went on: “

The novelists might be the greatest possible help to us if they painted life as it is, and human feelings in their true proportion and relation, but for the most part they have been and are altogether noxious.

”

“Ah, nobody feels that anything happened,” said Charles Bellingham. “

The past of one’s experience doesn’t differ a great deal from the past of one’s knowledge.

It isn’t much more probable; it’s really a great deal less vivid than some scenes in a novel that one read when a boy.”

“Well, James, neither am I,” consented his cousin, helping himself from Lapham’s Apollinaris bottle. “

There would be very little talking at dinner if one only said the things that one was sure of.

”

The others laughed, and Bromfield Corey remarked thoughtfully, “What astonishes the craven civilian in all these things is the abundance—the superabundance—of heroism.

The cowards were the exception; the men that were ready to die, the rule.

”

“They’re not so picturesque,” said Bromfield Corey. “

You can paint a man dying for his country, but you can’t express on canvas a man fulfilling the duties of a good citizen.

”

“Commonplace? The commonplace is just that light, impalpable, aerial essence which they’ve never got into their confounded books yet.

The novelist who could interpret the common feelings of commonplace people would have the answer to ‘the riddle of the painful earth’ on his tongue.

”

“I don’t know.

Why shouldn’t people in love behave sensibly?

”

“But he’s worse than dead to her; and so am I. I’ve turned it over a million ways, mother; I’ve looked at it in every light you can put it in, and I can’t make anything but misery out of it.

You can see the misery at the first glance, and you can’t see more or less if you spend your life looking at it.

” She laughed again, as if the hopelessness of the thing amused her. Then she flew to the extreme of self-assertion. “Well, I have a right to him, and he has a right to me.

“Your father would think you were a fool,” said Mrs. Lapham, finding a sort of refuge in her strong disgust for the pseudo heroism. “No! If there’s to be any giving up, let it be by the one that shan’t make anybody but herself suffer.

There’s trouble and sorrow enough in the world, without making it on purpose!

”

She was a woman who had been used to seek the light by striving; she had hitherto literally worked to it.

But it is the curse of prosperity that it takes work away from us, and shuts that door to hope and health of spirit.

In this house, where everything had come to be done for her, she had no tasks to interpose between her and her despair.

“No.

What’s the use of blaming?

We don’t either of us want anything but the children’s good. What’s it all of it for, if it ain’t for that? That’s what we’ve both slaved for all our lives.”

“Surely,” said Sewell, “it’s all right. I thank you for coming—for trusting your trouble to me.

A time comes to every one of us when we can’t help ourselves, and then we must get others to help us.

If people turn to me at such a time, I feel sure that I was put into the world for something—if nothing more than to give my pity, my sympathy.”

Sewell remained silent, and they waited till he should speak. “We can be of use to one another here, because we can always be wiser for someone else than we can for ourselves.

We can see another’s sins and errors in a more merciful light⁠—and that is always a fairer light⁠—than we can our own; and we can look more sanely at others’ afflictions.

” He had addressed these words to Lapham; now he turned to his wife. “If someone had come to you, Mrs. Lapham, in just this perplexity, what would you have thought?”

Sewell remained silent, and they waited till he should speak. “

We can be of use to one another here, because we can always be wiser for someone else than we can for ourselves.

We can see another’s sins and errors in a more merciful light—and that is always a fairer light—than we can our own; and we can look more sanely at others’ afflictions.” He had addressed these words to Lapham; now he turned to his wife.

“I must do what you say,” he continued. “But what good will it do her?

You can’t make her happy by making yourself unhappy.

”

“Oh!” he groaned. “We have done no wrong.

Why should we suffer from another’s mistake as if it were our sin?

”

“So I have. I was convinced of that at the beginning, or my reason was.

You know very well that I am equal to any trial, any sacrifice, day after tomorrow; but when it comes today it’s another thing.

As long as this crisis decently kept its distance, I could look at it with an impartial eye; but now that it seems at hand, I find that, while my reason is still acquiescent, my nerves are disposed to—excuse the phrase—kick.

That brought the old times back, and he said: “If this had happened then, I shouldn’t have cared much.

I was young then, and I wasn’t afraid of anything. But I noticed that after I passed fifty I began to get scared easier.

I don’t believe I could pick up, now, from a regular knockdown.”

She looked at her mother with a smile that shone through her tears, and a pathos that quivered round her jesting lips. “

It’s easy enough to be sensible for other people.

But when it comes to myself, there I am! Especially, when I want to do what I oughtn’t so much that it seems as if doing what I didn’t want to do must be doing what I ought!

and at these moments, when his adviser could not oppose anything but experience and probability to the evidence of the fact, Lapham was buoyant with courage, and imparted his hopefulness to his household.

Our theory of disaster, of sorrow, of affliction, borrowed from the poets and novelists, is that it is incessant; but every passage in our own lives and in the lives of others, so far as we have witnessed them, teaches us that this is false.

The house of mourning is decorously darkened to the world, but within itself it is also the house of laughing.

Our theory of disaster, of sorrow, of affliction, borrowed from the poets and novelists, is that it is incessant; but every passage in our own lives and in the lives of others, so far as we have witnessed them, teaches us that this is false.

The house of mourning is decorously darkened to the world, but within itself it is also the house of laughing.

Bursts of gaiety, as heartfelt as its grief, relieve the gloom, and the stricken survivors have their jests together, in which the thought of the dead is tenderly involved, and a fond sense, not crazier than many others, of sympathy and enjoyment beyond the silence, …

heaven knows how they knew it. They said that nothing remained of the building but the walls; and Lapham, on his way to business, walked up past the smoke-stained shell.

The windows looked like the eye-sockets of a skull down upon the blackened and trampled snow of the street; the pavement was a sheet of ice, and the water from the engines had frozen, like streams of tears, down the face of the house, and hung in icy tags from the windowsills and copings.

He gathered himself up as well as he could, and went on to his office.

“There ain’t money enough in this country to buy out my paint,” said Lapham, buttoning up his coat in a quiver of resentment. “Good afternoon, sir.”

Men are but grown-up boys after all.

Bellingham watched this perversely proud and obstinate child fling petulantly out of his door, and felt a sympathy for him which was as truly kind as it was helpless.

and if he could have brought himself to ask his brothers for money, it would have been useless; they were simply well-to-do Western people, but not capitalists on the scale he required.

Lapham stood in the isolation to which adversity so often seems to bring men.

When its test was applied, practically or theoretically, to all those who had seemed his friends, there was none who bore it; and he thought with bitter self-contempt of the people whom he had befriended in their time of need.

They are uncultivated people, and so far as I have seen them, I’m not able to believe that poverty will improve them. Still, it may. Let us hope for the best, and let us behave as well as we know how.

I’m sure you will behave well, and I shall try.

I’m going with you to call on Miss Lapham. This is a thing that can’t be done by halves!”

she had lost all her babyish dependence and pliability; she was like iron; and here and there she was sharpened to a cutting edge. It had been a life and death struggle with her; she had conquered, but she had also necessarily lost much.

Perhaps what she had lost was not worth keeping; but at any rate she had lost it.

She required from her mother a strict and accurate account of her father’s affairs, so far as Mrs. Lapham knew them; and she showed a businesslike quickness in comprehending them that Penelope had never pretended to.