"
A BLUE-GRASS PENELOPE
I.
She was barely twenty-three years old. It is probable that up to that
age, and the beginning of this episode, her life had been uneventful.
Born to the easy mediocrity of such compensating extremes as a small
farmhouse and large lands, a good position and no society, in that vast
grazing district of Kentucky known as the "Blue Grass" region, all the
possibilities of a Western American girl's existence lay before her. A
piano in the bare-walled house, the latest patented mower in the
limitless meadows, and a silk dress sweeping the rough floor of the
unpainted "meeting-house," were already the promise of those
possibilities. Beautiful she was, but the power of that beauty was
limited by being equally shared with her few neighbors. There were
small, narrow, arched feet besides her own that trod the uncarpeted
floors of outlying log cabins with equal grace and dignity; bright,
clearly opened eyes that were equally capable of looking unabashed upon
princes and potentates, as a few later did, and the heiress of the
county judge read her own beauty without envy in the frank glances and
unlowered crest of the blacksmith's daughter.
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