Moreover
there was a likeness between her aunt's autograph and her own, a
characteristic turn in the looping of the letters, a hint of the same
decisiveness and precision. If Rachel had been educated fifty years
earlier, she might have written her name in just that manner.
"You're very like her in some ways," her father said, as she still
stared at the signature.
Rachel's eyelids drooped and her expression indicated a faint,
suppressed intolerance of her father's remark. He said the same things
so often, and in so precisely the same tone, that she had formed a
habit of automatically rejecting the truth of certain of his
statements. He had always appeared to her as senile. He had been over
fifty when she was born, and ever since she could remember she had
doubted the correctness of his information. She was, she had often told
herself, "a born sceptic; an ultra-modern." She had a certain
veneration for the more distant past, but none for her father's period.
"Victorianism" was to her a term of abuse. She had long since condemned
alike the ethic and the aesthetic of the nineteenth century as
represented by her father's opinions; so, that, even now, when his
familiar comment coincided so queerly with her own thought, she
instinctively disbelieved him.
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