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More than thirty years before the day of this biography, a blue-eyed girl sat in her brother's home in Beacon Street, weighing the problem which even then had begun to shake the social world every year at crocus time, Where shall we spend the summer?
When Mary Worcester's gentle mind, wavering between the hills and the shore with the pleasant agitation of a girl who has never known any compulsion severer than her own young choice upon her fate, turned in the direction of the mountain village which her mother used to fancy, it seemed the least important of acts or facts, and was so regarded by her brother; for Hermon Worcester was a preoccupied young man, more absorbed in adding to his fortune, inherited in wool, than in studying the natural history of an attractive orphaned younger sister, left, obviously, by Providence upon his hands.