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 This book is dedicated to the memory of
a great teacher, mathematician and friend
Burton W. Jones
Professor Emeritus, University of Colorado

Understanding Basic Statistics, © 2016, 2013, 2010 Cengage Learning

Seventh Edition
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Print Number: 01 Print Year: 2014

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 CONTENTS

Preface xvii
Table of Prerequisite Material 1

1 Getting Started 2
FOCUS PROBLEM: Where Have All the Fireflies Gone? 3
1.1 What Is Statistics? 4
1.2 Random Samples 13
1.3 Introduction to Experimental Design 22
Summary 32
Important Words & Symbols 32
Chapter Review Problems 33
Data Highlights: Group Projects 35
Linking Concepts: Writing Projects 36

USING TECHNOLOGY 37

2 Organizing Data 40
FOCUS PROBLEM: Say It with Pictures 41
2.1 Frequency Distributions, Histograms, and Related Topics 42
2.2 Bar Graphs, Circle Graphs, and Time-Series Graphs 59
2.3 Stem-and-Leaf Displays 69
Summary 78
Important Words & Symbols 78
Chapter Review Problems 79
Data Highlights: Group Projects 82
Linking Concepts: Writing Projects 83

USING TECHNOLOGY 84

3 Averages and Variation 86

FOCUS PROBLEM: The Educational Advantage 87
3.1 Measures of Central Tendency: Mode, Median, and Mean 88
3.2 Measures of Variation 100
3.3 Percentiles and Box-and-Whisker Plots 119
Summary 130
Important Words & Symbols 130
Chapter Review Problems 131
Data Highlights: Group Projects 133
Linking Concepts: Writing Projects 135
USING TECHNOLOGY 136

CUMULATIVE REVIEW PROBLEMS: CHAPTERS 1–3 137

4 Correlation and Regression 140

FOCUS PROBLEM: Changing Populations and Crime Rate 141
4.1 Scatter Diagrams and Linear Correlation 142
4.2 Linear Regression and the Coefficient of Determination 160
v
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Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it.
vi CONTENTS

Summary 180
Important Words & Symbols 180
Chapter Review Problems 181
Data Highlights: Group Projects 183
Linking Concepts: Writing Projects 184

USING TECHNOLOGY 185

5 Elementary Probability Theory 188

FOCUS PROBLEM: How Often Do Lie Detectors Lie? 189
5.1 What Is Probability? 190
5.2 Some Probability Rules—Compound Events 201
5.3 Trees and Counting Techniques 221
Summary 232
Important Words & Symbols 232
Chapter Review Problems 233
Data Highlights: Group Projects 235
Linking Concepts: Writing Projects 237
USING TECHNOLOGY 238

6 The Binomial Probability

Distribution and Related Topics 240
FOCUS PROBLEM: Personality Preference Types: Introvert or
Extrovert? 241
6.1 Introduction to Random Variables and Probability Distributions 242
6.2 Binomial Probabilities 254
6.3 Additional Properties of the Binomial Distribution 269
Summary 280
Important Words & Symbols 280
Chapter Review Problems 281
Data Highlights: Group Projects 283
Linking Concepts: Writing Projects 285

USING TECHNOLOGY 287

CUMULATIVE REVIEW PROBLEMS: CHAPTERS 4–6 288

7 Normal Curves and Sampling Distributions 290

FOCUS PROBLEM: Impulse Buying 291
7.1 Graphs of Normal Probability Distributions 292
7.2 Standard Units and Areas Under the Standard Normal Distribution 301
7.3 Areas Under Any Normal Curve 312
7.4 Sampling Distributions 326
7.5 The Central Limit Theorem 332
7.6 Normal Approximation to Binomial Distribution and to p̂
Distribution 343
Summary 354

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Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it.
 CONTENTS vii

Important Words & Symbols 355

Chapter Review Problems 355
Data Highlights: Group Projects 358
Linking Concepts: Writing Projects 359

USING TECHNOLOGY 361

8 Estimation 366
FOCUS PROBLEM: Trick or Treat 367
8.1 Estimating m When s Is Known 368
8.2 Estimating m When s Is Unknown 382
8.3 Estimating p in the Binomial Distribution 395
Summary 409
Important Words & Symbols 409
Chapter Review Problems 410
Data Highlights: Group Projects 412
Linking Concepts: Writing Projects 414

USING TECHNOLOGY 415

9 Hypothesis Testing 418

FOCUS PROBLEM: Benford’s Law: The Importance of Being
Number 1 419
9.1 Introduction to Statistical Tests 420
9.2 Testing the Mean m 436
9.3 Testing a Proportion p 452
Summary 464
Finding the P-Value Corresponding to a Sample Test Statistic 464
Important Words & Symbols 465
Chapter Review Problems 465
Data Highlights: Group Projects 467
Linking Concepts: Writing Projects 468

USING TECHNOLOGY 469

CUMULATIVE REVIEW PROBLEMS: CHAPTERS 7–9 471

10 Inferences About Differences 474

FOCUS PROBLEM: The Trouble with Wood Ducks 475
10.1 Tests Involving Paired Differences (Dependent Samples) 476
10.2 Inferences about the Difference of Two Means m1 – m2 489
10.3 Inferences about the Difference of Two Proportions p1 – p2 510
Summary 521
Important Words & Symbols 521
Chapter Review Problems 521
Data Highlights: Group Projects 525
Linking Concepts: Writing Projects 525

USING TECHNOLOGY 526

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Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it.
viii CONTENTS

11 Additional Topics Using Inference 528

FOCUS PROBLEM: Archaeology in Bandelier National Monument 529
Part I: Inferences Using the Chi-Square Distribution 530
Overview of the Chi-Square Distribution 530
11.1 Chi-Square: Tests of Independence and of Homogeneity 531
11.2 Chi-Square: Goodness of Fit 545
11.3 Testing a Single Variance or Standard Deviation 553
Part II: Inferences Relating to Linear Regression 562
11.4 Inferences for Correlation and Regression 562
Summary 582
Important Words & Symbols 582
Chapter Review Problems 583
Data Highlights: Group Projects 585
Linking Concepts: Writing Projects 586

USING TECHNOLOGY 587

CUMULATIVE REVIEW PROBLEMS: CHAPTERS 10–11 588

Appendix: Tables A1
Table 1: Random Numbers A1
Table 2: Binomial Probability Distribution Cn,r prqn⫺r A3
Table 3: Areas of a Standard Normal Distribution A8
Table 4: Critical Values for Student’s t Distribution A10
Table 5: The x2 Distribution A11
Answers and Key Steps to Odd-Numbered Problems A12
Answers to Selected Even-Numbered Problems A43
Index I1

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Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it.
CRITICAL THINKING

Students need to develop critical thinking skills in order to understand and evaluate the limitations
of statistical methods. Understanding Basic Statistics makes students aware of method appropriate-
ness, assumptions, biases, and justifiable conclusions.

b Critical Thinking
CRITICAL THINKING UNUSUAL VALUES Critical thinking is an important
Chebyshev’s theorem tells us that no matter what the data distribution skill for students to develop in or-
looks like, at least 75% of the data will fall within 2 standard deviations der to avoid reaching misleading
of the mean. As we will see in Chapter 6, when the distribution is mound-
shaped and symmetrical, about 95% of the data are within 2 standard
conclusions. The Critical Thinking
deviations of the mean. Data values beyond 2 standard deviations from feature provides additional
the mean are less common than those closer to the mean. clarification on specific concepts
In fact, one indicator that a data value might be an outlier is that it is as a safeguard against incorrect
more than 2.5 standard deviations from the mean (Source: Statistics, by evaluation of information.
G. Upton and I. Cook, Oxford University Press).

UNUSUAL VALUES
For a binomial distribution, it is unusual for the number of successes r to be
higher than m 1 2.5s or lower than m 2.5s.

We can use this indicator to determine whether a number of

successes out of n trials in a binomial experiment are unusual.
For instance, consider a binomial experiment with 20 trials for which
probability of success on a single trial is p 5 0.70. The expected number
of successes is m 5 14, with a standard deviation of s < 2. A number of
successes above 19 or below 9 would be considered unusual. However,
such numbers of successes are possible.

Interpretation c SOLUTION: Since we want to know the number of standard deviations from the
mean, we want to convert 6.9 to standard z units.
Increasingly, calculators and computers are
used to generate the numeric results of a statisti- x m 6.9 8
cal process. However, the student still needs to z5
s
5
0.5
5 2.20
correctly interpret those results in the context
of a particular application. The Interpretation Interpretation The amount of cheese on the selected pizza is only 2.20 standard devi-
feature calls attention to this important step. ations below the mean. The fact that z is negative indicates that the amount of cheese
Interpretation is stressed in examples, in guided is 2.20 standard deviations below the mean. The parlor will not lose its franchise
exercises, and in the problem sets. based on this sample.

6. Interpretation A campus performance series features plays, music groups, b NEW! Critical Thinking and
dance troops, and stand-up comedy. The committee responsible for selecting
the performance groups include three students chosen at random from a pool
Interpretation Exercises
of volunteers. This year the 30 volunteers came from a variety of majors. In every section and chapter problem set, Critical Thinking
However, the three students for the committee were all music majors. Does
this fact indicate there was bias in the selection process and that the selection problems provide students with the opportunity to test their
process was not random? Explain. understanding of the application of statistical methods and
7 Critical Thinking Greg took a random sample of size 100 from the population their interpretation of their results. Interpretation problems
of current season ticket holders to State College men’s basketball games. ask students to apply statistical results to the particular
Then he took a random sample of size 100 from the population of current application.
season ticket holders to State College women’s basketball games.
(a)
venience, random) did Greg use to sample from the population of current
season ticket holders to all State College basketball games played by
either men or women?
(b) Is it appropriate to pool the samples and claim to have a random sample of
size 200 from the population of current season ticket holders to all State
College home basketball games played by either men or women? Explain.

ix
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Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it.
STATISTICAL LITERACY

No language, including statistics, can be spoken without learning the vocabulary. Understanding
Basic Statistics introduces statistical terms with deliberate care.

b NEW! What Does (concept,

WHAT DOES THE LEVEL OF MEASUREMENT TELL US? method, statistical result) Tell Us?
The level of measurement tells us which arithmetic processes are appro- This feature gives a brief summary of the informa-
priate for the data. This is important because different statistical processes tion we obtain from the named concept, method,
require various kinds of arithmetic. In some instances all we need to do is or statistical result.
In such cases nomi-
nal (and higher) data levels are all appropriate. In other cases we need to or-
der the data, so nominal data would not be suitable. Many other statistical
processes require division, so data need to be at the ratio level. Just keep
the nature of the data in mind before beginning statistical computations.

NEW! Important Features of a

(concept, method, or result) c IMPORTANT FEATURES OF A SIMPLE RANDOM SAMPLE
In statistics we use many different types of For a simple random sample
graphs, samples, data, and analytical methods. • n from the population has an equal
The features of each such tool help us select the chance of being selected.
most appropriate ones to use and help us inter- • No researcher bias occurs in the items selected for the sample.
pret the information we receive from applications • -
ulation. For instance, from a population of 10 cats and 10 dogs, a
of the tools.
random sample of size 6 could consist of all cats.

b Statistical Literacy Problems

In every section and chapter problem set,
Statistical Literacy problems test student under-
standing of terminology, statistical methods,
and the appropriate conditions for use of the
different processes.

Definition Boxes c BOX-AND-WHISKER PLOTS

Whenever important terms are introduced in The quartiles together with the low and high data values give us a very useful
text, tan definition boxes appear within the number summary of the data and their spread.
discussions. These boxes make it easy to refer-
ence or review terms as they are used further.
FIVE-NUMBER SUMMARY
Lowest value, Q1, median, Q3, highest value

box-and-whisker plot. Box-and-whisker plots provide another useful technique

from exploratory data analysis (EDA) for describing data.

x
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Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it.
STATISTICAL LITERACY

b Important Words
& Symbols
The Important Words &
Symbols within the Chapter
Review feature at the end of
each chapter summarizes
the terms introduced in the
Definition Boxes for student
review at a glance. Page
numbers for first occurrence
of term are given for easy
reference.

Linking Concepts:
Writing Projects c LINKING CONCEPTS: Discuss each of the following topics in class or review the topics on your own. Then
write a brief but complete essay in which you summarize the main points. Please
WRITING PROJECTS
include formulas and graphs as appropriate.
Much of statistical literacy is the ability 1. What does it mean to say that we are going to use a sample to draw an inference
to communicate concepts effectively. about a population? Why is a random sample so important for this process? If
The Linking Concepts: Writing Projects we wanted a random sample of students in the cafeteria, why couldn’t we just
choose the students who order Diet Pepsi with their lunch? Comment on the
feature at the end of each chapter statement, “A random sample is like a miniature population, whereas samples
tests both statistical literacy and critical that are not random are likely to be biased.” Why would the students who order
thinking by asking the student to express Diet Pepsi with lunch not be a random sample of students in the cafeteria?
their understanding in words. 2. In your own words, explain the differences among the following sampling
-
ter sample, multistage sample, and convenience sample. Describe situations in
which each type might be useful.

5. Basic Computation: Central Limit Theorem Suppose x has a distribution with

b Basic Computation
a mean of 8 and a standard deviation of 16. Random samples of size n 5 64 Problems
are drawn. These problems focus student
(a) Describe the x distribution and compute the mean and standard deviation attention on relevant formulas,
of the distribution. requirements, and computation-
(b) Find the z value corresponding to x 5 9. al procedures. After practicing
(c) Find P x 7 9 . these skills, students are more
(d) Interpretation Would it be unusual for a random sample of size 64 from confident as they approach
real-world applications.
the x distribution to have a sample mean greater than 9? Explain.

30. Expand Your Knowledge: Geometric Mean When data consist of percent-
ages, ratios, growth rates, or other rates of change, the geometric mean is a
useful measure of central tendency. For n data values,
n
Geometric mean 5 1product of the n data values, assuming all data
Expand Your Knowledge values are positive
Problems c average growth factor over 5 years of an investment in a mutual
Expand Your Knowledge problems present
-
optional enrichment topics that go be- metric mean of 1.10, 1.12, 1.148, 1.038, and 1.16. Find the average growth
yond the material introduced in a section. factor of this investment.
Vocabulary and concepts needed to solve Note that for the same data, the relationships among the harmonic, geomet-
the problems are included at point-of-use, ric, and arithmetic means are harmonic mean geometric mean arithmetic
expanding students’ statistical literacy. mean (Source: Oxford Dictionary of Statistics).

xi
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Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it.
DIRECTION AND PURPOSE

Real knowledge is delivered through direction, not just facts. Understanding Basic Statistics
ensures the student knows what is being covered and why at every step along the way to statisti-
cal literacy.

Chapter Preview c
Questions NORMAL CURVES AND SAMPLING
Preview Questions at the beginning
of each chapter give the student a
DISTRIBUTIONS
taste of what types of questions can
be answered with an understanding PREVIEW QUESTIONS
of the knowledge to come. What are some characteristics of a normal distribution? What does the empiri-
cal rule tell you about data spread around the mean? (SECTION 7.1)
Can you compare apples and oranges, or maybe elephants and butterflies? In
most cases, the answer is no—unless you first standardize your measurements.
What are a standard normal distribution and a standard z score? (SECTION 7.2)
How do you convert any normal distribution to a standard normal distribution?
How do you find probabilities of “standardized events”? (SECTION 7.3)
As humans, our experiences are finite and limited. Consequently, most of the
important decisions in our lives are based on sample (incomplete) information.
What is a probability sampling distribution? How will sampling distributions
help us make good decisions based on incomplete information? (SECTION 7.4)
There is an old saying: All roads lead to Rome. In statistics, we could recast this
saying: All probability distributions average out to be normal distributions (as
the sample size increases). How can we take advantage of this in our study of
sampling distributions? (SECTION 7.5)
The binomial and normal distributions are two of the most important probability
distributions in statistics. Under certain limiting conditions, the binomial can

Dana White/PhotoEdit
be thought to evolve (or envelope) into the normal distribution. How can
you apply this concept in the real world? (SECTION 7.6)
Many issues in life come down to success or failure. In most cases, we will not be
successful all the time, so proportions of successes are very important. What is
the probability sampling distribution for proportions? (SECTION 7.6)

FOCUS PROBLEM
Benford’s Law: The Importance of Being Number 1
Benford’s Law states that in a wide variety
of circumstances, numbers have “1” as their
first nonzero digit disproportionately often.
Benford’s Law applies to such diverse top-
ics as the drainage areas of rivers; properties
of chemicals; populations of towns; figures
in newspapers, magazines, and government
reports; and the half-lives of radioactive
atoms!

begin with “1” about 30% of the time, with “2”

about 18% of time, and with “3” about 12.5% of
the time. Larger digits occur less often. For ex-
ample, less than 5% of the numbers in circum-
stances such as these begin with the digit 9. This
is in dramatic contrast to a random sampling
situation, in which each of the digits 1 through
Reuters/Corbis

9 has an equal chance of appearing.

from large bodies of numerical records such

▲ Chapter Focus Problems

The Preview Questions in each chapter are followed by
a Focus Problem, which serves as a more specific ex-
ample of what questions the student will soon be able to
answer. The Focus Problems are set within appropriate
applications and are incorporated into the end-of-section
exercises, giving students the opportunity to test their
understanding.
xii
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Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it.
DIRECTION AND PURPOSE

Focus Points c
Each section opens with bul-
leted Focus Points describing
the primary learning objec-
tives of the section.

b Looking Forward
L OO K I N G FO RWAR D This feature shows students where the presented material will be used
later. It helps motivate students to pay a little extra attention to key
In later chapters we will use information based topics.
on a sample and sample statistics to estimate
population parameters (Chapter 8) or make
decisions about the value of population param-
eters (Chapter 9).

CHAPTER REVIEW
In this chapter, you’ve seen that statistics is the • Sampling strategies, including simple random,
SUMMARY study of how to collect, organize, analyze, and
interpret numerical information from popula- nience. Inferential techniques presented in this
tions or samples. This chapter discussed some text are based on simple random samples.
of the features of data and ways to collect data. • Methods of obtaining data: Use of a census,
In particular, the chapter discussed simulation, observational studies, experi-
• Individuals or subjects of a study and the vari- ments, and surveys
ables associated with those individuals • Concerns: Undercoverage of a population,
nonresponse, bias in data from surveys and
tive, and levels of measurement of data other factors, effects of confounding or lurk-
• Sample and population data. Summary ing variables on other variables, generaliza-
measurements from sample data are called tion of study results beyond the population of
statistics, and those from populations are the study, and study sponsorship
called parameters.

▲ Chapter Summaries
The Summary within each Chapter Review feature now also appears in bulleted
form, so students can see what they need to know at a glance.

xiii
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Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it.
REAL-WORLD SKILLS

Statistics is not done in a vacuum. Understanding Basic Statistics gives students valuable skills for
the real world with technology instruction, genuine applications, actual data, and group projects.

REVISED! Tech Notes c Box-and-Whisker Plot

TECH NOTES
Tech Notes appearing throughout the Both Minitab and the TI-84Plus/TI-83Plus/TI-nspire calculators support box-
text give students helpful hints on using and-whisker plots. On the TI-84Plus/TI-83Plus/TI-nspire, the quartiles Q1 and Q3
are calculated as we calculate them in this text. In Minitab and Excel 2010, they are
TI-84Plus and TI-nspire (with TI-84Plus calculated using a slightly different process.
keypad) and TI-83Plus calculators, TI-84Plus/TI-83Plus/TI-nspire (with TI-84Plus Keypad) Press STATPLOT ➤On.
Microsoft Excel 2010, and Minitab to Highlight box plot. Use Trace and the arrow keys to display the values of the
solve a problem. They include display
screens to help students visualize and
better understand the solution.

Med = 221.5

Excel 2010 Does not produce box-and-whisker plot. However, each value of the
Home ribbon, click the Insert Function
fx. In the dialogue box, select Statistical as the category and scroll to Quartile. In
the dialogue box, enter the data location and then enter the number of the value you

USING TECHNOLOGY Minitab Press Graph ➤ Boxplot. In the dialogue box, set Display to IQRange Box.

Binomial Distributions -
Although tables of binomial probabilities can be found in priate subtraction of probabilities, rather than addition of
most libraries, such tables are often inadequate. Either the
value of p (the probability of success on a trial) you are 3 to 7 easier.
looking for is not in the table, or the value of n (the number 3. Estimate the probability that Juneau will have at most 7
of trials) you are looking for is too large for the table. In clear days in December.
4. Estimate the probability that Seattle will have from 5 to
b REVISED!
Chapter 6, we will study the normal approximation to the
binomial. This approximation is a great help in many prac- 10 (including 5 and 10) clear days in December.
5. Estimate the probability that Hilo will have at least 12
Using Technology
tical applications. Even so, we sometimes use the formula
clear days in December.
for the binomial probability distribution on a computer or
6. Estimate the probability that Phoenix will have 20 or
Further technology instruction
graphing calculator to compute the probability we want.
more clear days in December. is available at the end of each
Applications 7. Estimate the probability that Las Vegas will have from
20 to 25 (including 20 and 25) clear days in December. chapter in the Using Technology
The following percentages were obtained over many years
of observation by the U.S. Weather Bureau. All data listed Technology Hints
section. Problems are presented
are for the month of December. with real-world data from a
TI-84Plus/TI-83Plus/TI-nspire (with TI-84
Long-Term Mean % Plus keypad), Excel 2010, Minitab variety of disciplines that can be
Location of Clear Days in Dec.
solved by using TI-84Plus and
Juneau, Alaska 18% for binomial distribution functions on the TI-84Plus/
Seattle, Washington 24% TI-83Plus/TI-nspire (with TI-84Plus keypad) calculators, TI-nspire (with TI-84Plus keypad)
Hilo, Hawaii 36% Excel 2010, and Minitab. and TI-83Plus calculators,
Honolulu, Hawaii
Las Vegas, Nevada
60%
75%
SPSS Microsoft Excel 2010, and
In SPSS, the function PDF.BINOM(q,n,p) gives the prob-
Phoenix, Arizona 77% ability of q successes out of n trials, where p is the prob-
Minitab.
Adapted from Local Climatological Data, U.S. Weather Bureau publication, “Normals, ability of success on a single trial. In the data editor, name
Means, and Extremes” Table. a variable r and enter values 0 through n. Name another
In the locations listed, the month of December is a rela- variable Prob_r. Then use the menu choices Transform ➤
tively stable month with respect to weather. Since weather Compute. In the dialogue box, use Prob_r for the target
patterns from one day to the next are more or less the same, variable. In the function group, select PDF and Noncentral
it is reasonable to use a binomial probability model. PDF. In the function box, select PDF.BINOM(q,n,p). Use
1. Let r be the number of clear days in December. Since the variable r for q and appropriate values for n and p. Note
December has 31 days, 0 r 31. Using appropriate that the function CDF.BINOM(q,n,p), from the CDF and
Noncentral CDF group, gives the cumulative probability of
the probability P(r) for each of the listed locations when 0 through q successes.
r 5 0, 1, 2, . . . , 31.
2. For each location, what is the expected value of the
probability distribution? What is the standard deviation?

xiv
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Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it.
REAL-WORLD SKILLS

b UPDATED! Applications
Real-world applications are used from
the beginning to introduce each statisti-
cal process. Rather than just crunching
numbers, students come to appreciate
the value of statistics through relevant
examples.

11. Pain Management: Laser Therapy “Effect of Helium-Neon Laser

Auriculotherapy on Experimental Pain Threshold” is the title of an article in
the journal Physical Therapy (Vol. 70, No. 1, pp. 24–30). In this article, laser
therapy was discussed as a useful alternative to drugs in pain management of
chronically ill patients. To measure pain threshold, a machine was used that de-
livered low-voltage direct current to different parts of the body (wrist, neck, and
back). The machine measured current in milliamperes (mA). The pretreatment

Most exercises in each section c detectable) at 5 3.15 mA with standard deviation 5 1.45 mA. Assume that
are applications problems. the distribution of threshold pain, measured in milliamperes, is symmetrical and
more or less mound-shaped. Use the empirical rule to
(a) estimate a range of milliamperes centered about the mean in which about
68% of the experimental group had a threshold of pain.
(b) estimate a range of milliamperes centered about the mean in which about
95% of the experimental group had a threshold of pain.

b Data Highlights:
Group Projects
Using Group Projects, students gain
experience working with others by
discussing a topic, analyzing data,
and collaborating to formulate their
response to the questions posed in
the exercise.

xv
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Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it.
MAKING THE JUMP

Get to the “Aha!” moment faster. Understanding Basic Statistics provides the push students need to
get there through guidance and example.

b Procedures and
PROCEDURE
Requirements
Procedure display boxes
HOW TO TEST M WHEN S IS KNOWN
summarize simple step-by-
Requirements step strategies for carrying
Let x be a random variable appropriate to your application. Obtain a simple out statistical procedures and
random sample (of size n) of x values from which you compute the sample methods as they are introduced.
mean x s is already known (perhaps from a previous study). If Requirements for using the pro-
you can assume that x has a normal distribution, then any sample size n will cedures are also stated. Students
work. If you cannot assume this, then use a sample size n 30. can refer to these boxes as they
Procedure practice using the procedures.
1. In the context of the application, state the null and alternate hypotheses
and set the a.
2. Use the known s, the sample size n, the value of x from the sample, and m
from the null hypothesis to compute the standardized sample test statistic.
x m
z5
s
1n
3. Use the standard normal distribution and the type of test, one-tailed
P-value corresponding to the test statistic.
4. Conclude the test. If P-value a, then reject H0. If P-value 7 a, then
do not reject H0.
5. Interpret your conclusion in the context of the application.
Jupiterimages/Stockbyte/Getty
Images

Guided Exercises c
Students gain experience with new
procedures and methods through
Guided Exercises. Beside each
problem in a Guided Exercise, a
completely worked-out solution ap-
pears for immediate reinforcement.
xvi
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Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it.
 Preface

Welcome to the exciting world of statistics! We have written this text to make statis-
tics accessible to everyone, including those with a limited mathematics background.
Statistics affects all aspects of our lives. Whether we are testing new medical devices
or determining what will entertain us, applications of statistics are so numerous that,
in a sense, we are limited only by our own imagination in discovering new uses for
statistics.

OVERVIEW
The seventh edition of Understanding Basic Statistics continues to emphasize
concepts of statistics. Statistical methods are carefully presented with a focus on un-
derstanding both the suitability of the method and the meaning of the result. Statistical
methods and measurements are developed in the context of applications.
Critical thinking and interpretation are essential in understanding and evaluating
information. Statistical literacy is fundamental for applying and comprehending
statistical results. In this edition we have expanded and highlighted the treatment
of statistical literacy, critical thinking, and interpretation.
We have retained and expanded features that made the first six editions of the
text very readable. Definition boxes highlight important terms. Procedure displays
summarize steps for analyzing data. Examples, exercises, and problems touch on
applications appropriate to a broad range of interests.
The seventh edition continues to have extensive online support. Online home-
work powered by a choice of Enhanced WebAssign or Aplia™ is now available
through CengageBrain.com. Instructional videos are available on DVD. The com-
panion web site at http://www.cengagebrain.com contains more than 100 data sets
(in JMP, Microsoft Excel, Minitab, SPSS, and TI-84Plus/TI-83Plus/TI-nspire with
TI-84Plus keypad ASCII file formats), technology guides, lecture aids, a glossary,
and statistical tables.

MAJOR CHANGES IN THE SEVENTH EDITION

With each new edition, the authors reevaluate the scope, appropriateness, and effec-
tiveness of the text’s presentation and reflect on extensive user feedback. Revisions
have been made throughout the text to clarify explanations of important concepts and
to update problems.

JMP Statistical Software

All new copies of the text now come with JMP statistical software at no additional
cost. We realize the vital importance of having a data analysis tool and understand
the desirability for students to acquire familiarity with a commercial software pack-
age whose use might continue outside of this course. The text can still be used with
many popular software packages as well. See Instructor Resources on page xxiii for
a full description of the software.

New for the seventh edition, available via Aplia™, is MindTap™ Reader, Cengage
Learning’s next-generation eBook. MindTap Reader provides robust opportuni-
ties for students to annotate, take notes, navigate, and interact with the text (e.g.,
ReadSpeaker). Annotations captured in MindTap Reader are automatically tied to
the Notepad app, where they can be viewed chronologically and in a cogent, linear

xvii
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Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it.
xviii PREFACE

fashion. Instructors also can edit the text and assets in the Reader as well as add vid-
eos or URLs. Go to http://www.cengage.com/mindtap for more information.

Critical Thinking, Interpretation, and Statistical Literacy

The seventh edition of this text continues and expands the emphasis on critical think-
ing, interpretation, and statistical literacy. Calculators and computers are very good
at providing numerical results of statistical processes. However, numbers from a
computer or calculator display are meaningless unless the user knows how to inter-
pret the results and if the statistical process is appropriate. This text helps students
determine whether or not a statistical method or process is appropriate. It helps stu-
dents understand what a statistic measures. It helps students interpret the results of a
confidence interval, hypothesis test, or liner regression model.

New Interpretation Features

To further understanding and interpretation of statistical concepts, methods, and re-
sults, we have included two new special features: What Does (a concept, method,
or result) Tell Us? and Important Features of a (concept, method, or result).
These features summarize the information we obtain from concepts and statistical
processes and give additional insights for further application.

New Expand Your Knowledge Problems and Quick Overview

Topics With Additional Applications
Expand Your Knowledge problems do just that! These are optional but contain very
useful information taken from the vast literature of statistics. These topics are not
included in the main text but are easily learned using material from the section or
previous sections. Although these topics are optional, the authors feel they add depth
and enrich a student’s learning experience. Each topic was chosen for its relatively
straightforward presentation and useful applications. All such problems and their
applications are flagged with a sun logo.
New Expand Your Knowledge problems in the seventh edition provide additional
topics found in Advanced Placement courses. These topics include logarithmic trans-
formation problems featuring exponential growth and power law applications, linear
functions of random variables, and confidence intervals for the slope of the least-
squares line. Also new are problems involving stratified sampling and the best esti-
mate for the population mean ␮.
Some of the other topics in Expand Your Knowledge problems or quick over-
views include graphs such as dotplots, donut graphs, and variations on stem-
and-leaf plots; outliers in stem-and-leaf plots; harmonic and geometric means;
moving averages; calculating odds in favor and odds against; continuous uni-
form distribution, quick estimate of the standard deviation using the Empirical
rule; plus four confidence intervals for proportions; Satterthwaite’s approxima-
tion for degrees of freedom in confidence intervals and hypothesis tests; rela-
tionship between confidence intervals and two-tailed hypothesis testing; pooled
two-sample procedures for confidence intervals and hypothesis tests; resampling
(also known as bootstrap); simulations of confidence intervals and hypothesis
tests using different samples of the same size; and serial correlation (also called
autocorrelation).
For location of these optional topics in the text, please see the index.

Revised Examples and New Section Problems

Examples and guided exercises have been updated and revised. Additional section
problems emphasize critical thinking and interpretation of statistical results.

Copyright 2016 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s).
Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it.
 PREFACE xix

Excel 2010 and Most Recent Operating System for the

TI-84Plus/TI-83Plus Calculators
Excel 2010 instructions are included in the Tech Notes and Using Technology. The
latest operating system (v2.55MP) for the TI-84Plus/TI-83Plus calculators is also
discussed, with new functions such as the inverse t distribution and the chi-square
goodness of fit test described. One convenient feature of the operating system is that
it provides on-screen prompts for inputs required for many probability and statistical
functions. This operating system is already on new TI-84Plus/TI-83Plus calculators
and is available for download to older calculators at the Texas Instruments web site.

Revised Electronic Student Resources

Digital student resources and online tools that accompany Understanding Basic Statistics
have been revised in accordance with recommendations from both student and faculty
users. New copies of the text come with JMP statistical software. Online interactive learn-
ing solutions, such as Aplia™ for Statistics—featuring the new MindTap™ Reader—and
Enhanced WebAssign, are both available.

CONTINUING CONTENT
Introduction of Hypothesis Testing Using P-Values
In keeping with the use of computer technology and standard practice in research,
hypothesis testing is introduced using P-values. The critical region method is still
supported but not given primary emphasis.

Use of Student’s t Distribution in Confidence Intervals and

Testing of Means
If the normal distribution is used in confidence intervals and testing of means, then the
population standard deviation must be known. If the population standard deviation is
not known, then under conditions described in the text, the Student’s t distribution
is used. This is the most commonly used procedure in statistical research. It is also
used in statistical software packages such as JMP, Microsoft Excel, Minitab, SPSS,
and TI-84Plus/TI-83Plus/TI-nspire calculators.

Confidence Intervals and Hypothesis Tests of Difference

of Means
If the normal distribution is used, then both population standard deviations must be
known. When this is not the case, the Student’s t distribution incorporates an approx-
imation for t, with a commonly used conservative choice for the degrees of freedom.
Satterthwaite’s approximation for the degrees of freedom as used in computer soft-
ware is also discussed. The pooled standard deviation is presented for appropriate
applications (s1 ⬇ s2).

FEATURES IN THE SEVENTH EDITION

Chapter and Section Lead-ins
• Preview Questions at the beginning of each chapter are keyed to the sections.
• Focus Problems at the beginning of each chapter demonstrate types of questions
students can answer once they master the concepts and skills presented in the
chapter.
• Focus Points at the beginning of each section describe the primary learning objec-
tives of the section.

Copyright 2016 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s).
Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it.
xx PREFACE

Carefully Developed Pedagogy

• Examples show students how to select and use appropriate procedures.
• Guided Exercises within the sections give students an opportunity to work with
a new concept. Completely worked-out solutions appear beside each exercise to
give immediate reinforcement.
• Definition boxes highlight important definitions throughout the text.
• Procedure displays summarize key strategies for carrying out statistical procedures
and methods. Conditions required for using the procedure are also stated.
• NEW! What Does (a concept method or result) Tell Us? summarizes information
we obtain from the named concepts and statistical processes and gives insight for
additional application.
• NEW! Important Features of a (concept, method, or result) summarizes the features
of the listed item.
• Looking Forward features give a brief preview of how a current topic is used later.
• Labels for each example or guided exercise highlight the technique, concept, or
process illustrated by the example or guided exercise. In addition, labels for sec-
tion and chapter problems describe the field of application and show the wide
variety of subjects in which statistics is used.
• Section and chapter problems require the student to use all the new concepts mas-
tered in the section or chapter. Problem sets include a variety of real-world appli-
cations with data or settings from identifiable sources. Key steps and solutions to
odd-numbered problems appear at the end of the book.
• Basic Computation problems ask students to practice using formulas and statisti-
cal methods on very small data sets. Such practice helps students understand what
a statistic measures.
• Statistical Literacy problems ask students to focus on correct terminology and
processes of appropriate statistical methods. Such problems occur in every section
and chapter problem set.
• Interpretation problems ask students to explain the meaning of the statistical
results in the context of the application.
• Critical Thinking problems ask students to analyze and comment on various
issues that arise in the application of statistical methods and in the interpreta-
tion of results. These problems occur in every section and chapter problem set.
• Expand Your Knowledge problems present enrichment topics such as dot plots, grouped
data, estimation of standard deviation from a range of data values, residual plots, relation-
ship between confidence intervals and two-tailed hypothesis tests, and more.
• Cumulative review problem sets occur after every third chapter and include key
topics from previous chapters. Answers to all cumulative review problems are
given at the end of the book.
• Data Highlights and Linking Concepts provide group projects and writing projects.
• Viewpoints are brief essays presenting diverse situations in which statistics is used.
• Design and photos are appealing and enhance readability.

Technology Within the Text

• Tech Notes within sections provide brief point-of-use instructions for the
TI-84Plus, TI-83Plus, and TI-nspire (with 84Plus keypad) calculators, Microsoft
Excel 2010, and Minitab.
• Using Technology sections show the use of SPSS as well as the TI-84Plus,
TI-83Plus, and TI-nspire (with TI-84Plus keypad) calculators, Microsoft Excel,
and Minitab.

ALTERNATE ROUTES THROUGH THE TEXT

Understanding Basic Statistics, Seventh Edition, is designed to be flexible. It offers
the professor a choice of teaching possibilities. In most one-semester courses, it is not

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Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it.
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
Aunt Cassie at forty-seven had been as shriveled and dried as she was now,
twenty years later.
The old woman said, “My dear girl, I am miserable ... miserable.” And
drying the tears that streamed down her face, she added, “It won’t be long
now until I go to join dear Mr. Struthers.”
Sabine wanted suddenly to laugh, at the picture of Aunt Cassie entering
Paradise to rejoin a husband whom she had always called, even in the
intimacy of married life, “Mr. Struthers.” She kept thinking that Mr.
Struthers might not find the reunion so pleasant as his wife anticipated. She
had always held a strange belief that Mr. Struthers had chosen death as the
best way out.
And she felt a sudden almost warm sense of returning memories, roused
by Aunt Cassie’s passion for overstatement. Aunt Cassie could never bring
herself to say simply, “I’m going to die” which was not at all true. She must
say, “I go to join dear Mr. Struthers.”
Sabine said, “Oh, no.... Oh, no.... Don’t say that.”
“I don’t sleep any more. I barely close my eyes at night.”
She had seated herself now and was looking about her, absorbing
everything in the room, the changes made by the dreadful O’Hara, the
furniture he had bought for the house. But most of all she was studying
Sabine, devouring her with sidelong, furtive glances; and Sabine, knowing
her so well, saw that the old woman had been given a violent shock. She
had come prepared to find a broken, unhappy Sabine and she had found
instead this smooth, rather hard and self-contained woman, superbly
dressed and poised, from the burnished red hair (that straight red hair the
aunts had once thought so hopeless) to the lizard-skin slippers—a woman
who had obviously taken hold of life with a firm hand and subdued it, who
was in a way complete.
“Your dear uncle never forgot you for a moment, Sabine, in all the years
you were away. He died, leaving me to watch over you.” And again the
easy tears welled up.
(“Oh,” thought Sabine, “you don’t catch me that way. You won’t put me
back where I once was. You won’t even have a chance to meddle in my
life.”)
Aloud she said, “It’s a pity I’ve always been so far away.”
 “But I’ve thought of you, my dear.... I’ve thought of you. Scarcely a
night passes when I don’t say to myself before going to sleep, ‘There is
poor Sabine out in the world, turning her back on all of us who love her.’ ”
She sighed abysmally. “I have thought of you, dear. I’ve prayed for you in
the long nights when I have never closed an eye.”
And Sabine, talking on half-mechanically, discovered slowly that, in
spite of everything, she was no longer afraid of Aunt Cassie. She was no
longer a shy, frightened, plain little girl; she even began to sense a
challenge, a combat which filled her with a faint sense of warmth. She kept
thinking, “She really hasn’t changed at all. She still wants to reach out and
take possession of me and my life. She’s like an octopus reaching out and
seizing each member of the family, arranging everything.” And she saw
Aunt Cassie now, after so many years, in a new light. It seemed to her that
there was something glittering and hard and a little sinister beneath all the
sighing and tears and easy sympathy. Perhaps she (Sabine) was the only one
in all the family who had escaped the reach of those subtle, insinuating
tentacles.... She had run away.
Meanwhile Aunt Cassie had swept from a vivid and detailed description
of the passing of Mr. Struthers into a catalogue of neighborhood and family
calamities, of deaths, of broken troths, financial disasters, and the
appearance on the horizon of the “dreadful O’Hara.” She reproached Sabine
for having sold her land to such an outsider. And as she talked on and on
she grew less and less human and more and more like some disembodied,
impersonal force of nature. Sabine, watching her with piercing green eyes,
found her a little terrifying. She had sharpened and hardened with age.
She discussed the divorces which had occurred in Boston, and at length,
leaning forward and touching Sabine’s hand with her thin, nervous one, she
said brokenly: “I felt for you in your trouble, Sabine. I never wrote you
because it would have been so painful. I see now that I evaded my duty. But
I felt for you.... I tried to put myself in your place. I tried to imagine dear
Mr. Struthers being unfaithful to me ... but, of course, I couldn’t. He was a
saint.” She blew her nose and repeated with passion, as if to herself, “A
saint!”
(“Yes,” thought Sabine, “a saint ... if ever there was one.”) She saw that
Aunt Cassie was attacking her now from a new point. She was trying to pity
her. By being full of pity the old woman would try to break down her
defenses and gain possession of her.
Sabine’s green eyes took one hard, glinting look. “Did you ever see my
husband?” she asked.
“No,” said Aunt Cassie, “but I’ve heard a great deal of him. I’ve been
told how you suffered.”
Sabine looked at her with a queer, mocking expression. “Then you’ve
been told wrongly. He is a fascinating man. I did not suffer. I assure you
that I would rather have shared him with fifty other women than have had
any one of the men about here all to myself.”
There was a frank immorality in this statement which put Aunt Cassie to
rout, bag and baggage. She merely stared, finding nothing to say in reply to
such a speech. Clearly, in all her life she had never heard any one say a
thing so bald and so frank, so completely naked of all pretense of gentility.
Sabine went on coldly, pushing her assault to the very end. “I divorced
him at last, not because he was unfaithful to me, but because there was
another woman who wanted to marry him ... a woman whom I respect and
like ... a woman who is still my friend. Understand that I loved him
passionately ... in a very fleshly way. One couldn’t help it. I wasn’t the only
woman.... He was a kind of devil, but a very fascinating one.”
The old woman was a little stunned but not by any means defeated.
Sabine saw a look come into her eyes, a look which clearly said, “So this is
what the world has done to my poor, dear, innocent little Sabine!” At last
she said with a sigh, “I find it an amazing world. I don’t know what it is
coming to.”
“Nor I,” replied Sabine with an air of complete agreement and sympathy.
She understood that the struggle was not yet finished, for Aunt Cassie had a
way of putting herself always in an impregnable position, of wrapping
herself in layer after layer of sighs and sympathy, of charity and
forgiveness, of meekness and tears, so that in the end there was no way of
suddenly tearing them aside and saying, “There you are ... naked at last, a
horrible meddling old woman!” And Sabine kept thinking, too, that if Aunt
Cassie had lived in the days of her witch-baiting ancestor, Preserved
Pentland, she would have been burned for a witch.
And all the while Sabine had been suffering, quietly, deep inside, behind
the frankly painted face ... suffering in a way which no one in the world had
ever suspected; for it was like tearing out her heart, to talk thus of Richard
Callendar, even to speak his name.
Aloud she said, “And how is Mrs. Pentland.... I mean Olivia ... not my
cousin.... I know how she is ... no better.”
“No better.... It is one of those things which I can never understand....
Why God should have sent such a calamity to a good man like my brother.”
“But Olivia ...” began Sabine, putting an end abruptly to what was
clearly the prelude to a pious monologue.
“Oh!... Olivia,” replied Aunt Cassie, launching into an account of the
young Mrs. Pentland. “Olivia is an angel ... an angel, a blessing of God sent
to my poor brother. But she’s not been well lately. She’s been rather sharp
with me ... even with poor Miss Peavey, who is so sensitive. I can’t imagine
what has come over her.”
It seemed that the strong, handsome Olivia was suffering from nerves.
She was, Aunt Cassie said, unhappy about something, although she could
not see why Olivia shouldn’t be happy ... a woman with everything in the
world.
“Everything?” echoed Sabine. “Has any one in the world got
everything?”
“It is Olivia’s fault if she hasn’t everything. All the materials are there.
She has a good husband ... a husband who never looks at other women.”
“Nor at his own wife either,” interrupted Sabine. “I know all about
Anson. I grew up with him.”
Aunt Cassie saw fit to ignore this. “She’s rich,” she said, resuming the
catalogue of Olivia’s blessings.
And again Sabine interrupted, “But what does money mean Aunt
Cassie? In our world one is rich and that’s the end of it. One takes it for
granted. When one isn’t rich any longer, one simply slips out of it. It has
very little to do with happiness....”
The strain was beginning to show on Aunt Cassie. “You’d find out if you
weren’t rich,” she observed with asperity, “if your father and great-
grandfather hadn’t taken care of their money.” She recovered herself and
made a deprecating gesture. “But don’t think I’m criticizing dear Olivia.
She is the best, the most wonderful woman.” She began to wrap herself
once more in kindliness and charity and forgiveness. “Only she seems to me
to be a little queer lately.”
Sabine’s artificially crimson mouth took on a slow smile. “It would be
too bad if the Pentland family drove two wives insane—one after the other.”
Again Aunt Cassie came near to defeat by losing her composure. She
snorted, and Sabine helped her out by asking: “And Anson?” ironically.
“What is dear Anson doing?”
She told him of Anson’s great work, “The Pentland Family and the
Massachusetts Bay Colony” and of its immense value as a contribution to
the history of the nation; and when she had finished with that, she turned to
Jack’s wretched health, saying in a low, melancholy voice, “It’s only a
matter of time, you know.... At least, so the doctors say.... With a heart like
that it’s only a matter of time.” The tears came again.
“And yet,” Sabine said slowly, “You say that Olivia has everything.”
“Well,” replied Aunt Cassie, “perhaps not everything.”
Before she left she inquired for Sabine’s daughter and was told that she
had gone over to Pentlands to see Sybil.
“They went to the same school in France,” said Sabine. “They were
friends there.”
“Yes,” said Aunt Cassie. “I was against Sybil’s going abroad to school. It
fills a girl’s head with queer ideas ... especially a school like that where any
one could go. Since she’s home, Sybil behaves very queerly.... I think it’ll
stand in the way of her success in Boston. The boys don’t like girls who are
different.”
“Perhaps,” said Sabine, “she may marry outside of Boston. Men aren’t
the same everywhere. Even in Boston there must be one or two who don’t
refer to women as ‘Good old So-and-so.’ Even in Boston there must be men
who like women who are well dressed ... women who are ladies....”
Aunt Cassie began to grow angry again, but Sabine swept over her.
“Don’t be insulted, Aunt Cassie. I only mean ladies in the old-fashioned,
glamorous sense..... Besides,” she continued, “whom could she marry who
wouldn’t be a cousin or a connection of some sort?”
“She ought to marry here ... among the people she’s always known.
There’s a Mannering boy who would be a good match, and James Thorne’s
youngest son.”
 Sabine smiled. “So you have plans for her already. You’ve settled it?”
“Of course, nothing is settled. I’m only thinking of it with Sybil’s
welfare in view. If she married one of those boys she’d know what she was
getting. She’d know that she was marrying a gentleman.”
“Perhaps ...” said Sabine. “Perhaps.” Somehow a devil had taken
possession of her and she added softly, “There was, of course, Horace
Pentland.... One can never be quite sure.” (She never forgot anything,
Sabine.)
And at the same moment she saw, standing outside the door that opened
on the terrace next to the marshes, a solid, dark, heavy figure which she
recognized with a sudden feeling of delight as O’Hara. He had been
walking across the fields with the wiry little Higgins, who had left him and
continued on his way down the lane in the direction of Pentlands. At the
sight of him, Aunt Cassie made every sign of an attempt to escape quickly,
but Sabine said in a voice ominous with sweetness, “You must meet Mr.
O’Hara. I think you’ve never met him. He’s a charming man.” And she
placed herself in such a position that it was impossible for the old woman to
escape without losing every vestige of dignity.
Then Sabine called gently, “Come in, Mr. O’Hara.... Mrs. Struthers is
here and wants so much to meet her new neighbor.”
The door opened and O’Hara stepped in, a swarthy, rather solidly built
man of perhaps thirty-five, with a shapely head on which the vigorous black
hair was cropped close, and with blue eyes that betrayed his Irish origin by
the half-hidden sparkle of amusement at this move of Sabine’s. He had a
strong jaw and full, rather sensual, lips and a curious sense of great physical
strength, as if all his clothes were with difficulty modeled to the muscles
that lay underneath. He wore no hat, and his skin was a dark tan, touched at
the cheek-bones by the dull flush of health and good blood.
He was, one would have said at first sight, a common, vulgar man in that
narrow-jawed world about Durham, a man, perhaps, who had come by his
muscles as a dock-laborer. Sabine had thought him vulgar in the beginning,
only to succumb in the end to a crude sort of power which placed him
above the realm of such distinctions. And she was a shrewd woman, too,
devoted passionately to the business of getting at the essence of people; she
knew that vulgarity had nothing to do with a man who had eyes so shrewd
and full of mockery.
 He came forward quietly and with a charming air of deference in which
there was a faint suspicion of nonsense, a curious shadow of vulgarity, only
one could not be certain whether he was not being vulgar by deliberation.
“It is a great pleasure,” he said. “Of course, I have seen Mrs. Struthers
many times ... at the horse shows ... the whippet races.”
Aunt Cassie was drawn up, stiff as a poker, with an air of having found
herself unexpectedly face to face with a rattlesnake.
“I have had the same experience,” she said. “And of course I’ve seen all
the improvements you have made here on the farm.” The word
“improvements” she spoke with a sort of venom in it, as if it had been
instead a word like “arson.”
“We’ll have some tea,” observed Sabine. “Sit down, Aunt Cassie.”
But Aunt Cassie did not unbend. “I promised Olivia to be back at
Pentlands for tea,” she said. “And I am late already.” Pulling on her black
gloves, she made a sudden dip in the direction of O’Hara. “We shall
probably see each other again, Mr. O’Hara, since we are neighbors.”
“Indeed, I hope so....”
Then she kissed Sabine again and murmured, “I hope, my dear, that you
will come often to see me, now that you’ve come back to us. Make my
house your own home.” She turned to O’Hara, finding a use for him
suddenly in her warfare against Sabine. “You know, Mr. O’Hara, she is a
traitor, in her way. She was raised among us and then went away for twenty
years. She hasn’t any loyalty in her.”
She made the speech with a stiff air of playfulness, as if, of course, she
were only making a joke and the speech meant nothing at all. Yet the air
was filled with a cloud of implications. It was the sort of tactics in which
she excelled.
Sabine went with her to the door, and when she returned she discovered
O’Hara standing by the window, watching the figure of Aunt Cassie as she
moved indignantly down the road in the direction of Pentlands. Sabine
stood there for a moment, studying the straight, strong figure outlined
against the light, and she got suddenly a curious sense of the enmity
between him and the old woman. They stood, the two of them, in a strange
way as the symbols of two great forces—the one negative, the other
intensely positive; the one the old, the other, the new; the one of decay, the
other of vigorous, almost too lush growth. Nothing could ever reconcile
them. According to the scheme of things, they would be implacable
enemies to the end. But Sabine had no doubts as to the final victor; the
same scheme of things showed small respect for all that Aunt Cassie stood
for. That was one of the wisdoms Sabine had learned since she had escaped
from Durham into the uncompromising realities of the great world.
When she spoke, she said in a noncommittal sort of voice, “Mrs.
Struthers is a remarkable woman.”
And O’Hara, turning, looked at her with a sudden glint of humor in his
blue eyes. “Extraordinary ... I’m sure of it.”
“And a powerful woman,” said Sabine. “Wise as a serpent and gentle as
a dove. It is never good to underestimate such strength. And now.... How do
you like your tea?”

He took no tea but contented himself with munching a bit of toast and
afterward smoking a cigar, clearly pleased with himself in a naïve way in
the rôle of landlord coming to inquire of his tenant whether everything was
satisfactory. He had a liking for this hard, clever woman who was now only
a tenant of the land—his land—which she had once owned. When he
thought of it—that he, Michael O’Hara, had come to own this farm in the
midst of the fashionable and dignified world of Durham—there was
something incredible in the knowledge, something which never ceased to
warm him with a strong sense of satisfaction. By merely turning his head,
he could see in the mirror the reflection of the long scar on his temple,
marked there by a broken bottle in the midst of a youthful fight along the
India Wharf. He, Michael O’Hara, without education save that which he
had given himself, without money, without influence, had raised himself to
this position before his thirty-sixth birthday. In the autumn he would be a
candidate for Congress, certain of election in the back Irish districts. He,
Michael O’Hara, was on his way to being one of the great men of New
England, a country which had once been the tight little paradise of people
like the Pentlands.
Only no one must ever suspect the depth of that great satisfaction.
Yes, he had a liking for this strange woman, who ought to have been his
enemy and, oddly enough, was not. He liked the shrewd directness of her
mind and the way she had of sitting there opposite him, turning him over
and over while he talked, as if he had been a small bug under a microscope.
She was finding out all about him; and he understood that, for it was a trick
in which he, himself, was well-practised. It was by such methods that he
had got ahead in the world. It puzzled him, too, that she should have come
out of that Boston-Durham world and yet could be so utterly different from
it. He had a feeling that somewhere in the course of her life something had
happened to her, something terrible which in the end had given her a great
understanding and clarity of mind. He knew, too, almost at once, on the day
she had driven up to the door of the cottage, that she had made a discovery
about life which he himself had made long since ... that there is nothing of
such force as the power of a person content merely to be himself, nothing so
invincible as the power of simple honesty, nothing so successful as the life
of one who runs alone. Somewhere she had learned all this. She was like a
woman to whom nothing could ever again happen.
They talked for a time, idly and pleasantly, with a sense of understanding
unusual in two people who had known each other for so short a time; they
spoke of the farm, of Pentlands, of the mills and the Poles in Durham, of the
country as it had been in the days when Sabine was a child. And all the
while he had that sense of her weighing and watching him, of feeling out
the faint echo of a brogue in his speech and the rather hard, nasal quality
that remained from those days along India Wharf and the memories of a
ne’er-do-well, superstitious Irish father.
He could not have known that she was a woman who included among
her friends men and women of a dozen nationalities, who lived a life among
the clever, successful people of the world ... the architects, the painters, the
politicians, the scientists. He could not have known the ruthless rule she put
up against tolerating any but people who were “complete.” He could have
known nothing of her other life in Paris, and London, and New York, which
had nothing to do with the life in Durham and Boston. And yet he did
know.... He saw that, despite the great difference in their worlds, there was
a certain kinship between them, that they had both come to look upon the
world as a pie from which any plum might be drawn if one only knew the
knack.
And Sabine, on her side, not yet quite certain about casting aside all
barriers, was slowly reaching the same understanding. There was no love or
sentimentality in the spark that flashed between them. She was more than
ten years older than O’Hara and had done with such things long ago. It was
merely a recognition of one strong person by another.
 It was O’Hara who first took advantage of the bond. In the midst of the
conversation, he had turned the talk rather abruptly to Pentlands.
“I’ve never been there and I know very little of the life,” he said, “but
I’ve watched it from a distance and it interests me. It’s like something out of
a dream, completely dead ... dead all save for young Mrs. Pentland and
Sybil.”
Sabine smiled. “You know Sybil, then?”
“We ride together every morning.... We met one morning by chance
along the path by the river and since then we’ve gone nearly every day.”
“She’s a charming girl.... She went to school in France with my
daughter, Thérèse. I saw a great deal of her then.”
Far back in her mind the thought occurred to her that there would be
something very amusing in the prospect of Sybil married to O’Hara. It
would produce such an uproar with Anson and Aunt Cassie and the other
relatives.... A Pentland married to an Irish Roman Catholic politician!
“She is like her mother, isn’t she?” asked O’Hara, sitting forward a bit
on his chair. He had a way of sitting thus, in the tense, quiet alertness of a
cat.
“Very like her mother.... Her mother is a remarkable woman ... a
charming woman ... also, I might say, what is the rarest of all things, a
really good and generous woman.”
“I’ve thought that.... I’ve seen her a half-dozen times. I asked her to help
me in planting the garden here at the cottage because I knew she had a
passion for gardens. And she didn’t refuse ... though she scarcely knew me.
She came over and helped me with it. I saw her then and came to know her.
But when that was finished, she went back to Pentlands and I haven’t seen
her since. It’s almost as if she meant to avoid me. Sometimes I feel sorry for
her.... It must be a queer life for a woman like that ... young and beautiful.”
“She has a great deal to occupy her at Pentlands. And it’s true that it’s
not a very fascinating life. Still, I’m sure she couldn’t bear being pitied....
She’s the last woman in the world to want pity.”
Curiously, O’Hara flushed, the red mounting slowly beneath the dark-
tanned skin.
“I thought,” he said a little sadly, “that her husband or Mrs. Struthers
might have raised objections.... I know how they feel toward me. There’s no
use pretending not to know.”
“It is quite possible,” said Sabine.
There was a sudden embarrassing silence, which gave Sabine time to
pull her wits together and organize a thousand sudden thoughts and
impressions. She was beginning to understand, bit by bit, the real reasons of
their hatred for O’Hara, the reasons which lay deep down underneath,
perhaps so deep that none of them ever saw them for what they were.
And then out of the silence she heard the voice of O’Hara saying, in a
queer, hushed way, “I mean to ask something of you ... something that may
sound ridiculous. I don’t pretend that it isn’t, but I mean to ask it anyway.”
For a moment he hesitated and then, rising quickly, he stood looking
away from her out of the door, toward the distant blue marshes and the open
sea. She fancied that he was trembling a little, but she could not be certain.
What she did know was that he made an immense and heroic effort, that for
a moment he, a man who never did such things, placed himself in a position
where he would be defenseless and open to being cruelly hurt; and for the
moment all the recklessness seemed to flow out of him and in its place there
came a queer sadness, almost as if he felt himself defeated in some way....
He said, “What I mean to ask you is this.... Will you ask me sometimes
here to the cottage when she will be here too?” He turned toward her
suddenly and added, “It will mean a great deal to me ... more than you can
imagine.”
She did not answer him at once, but sat watching him with a poorly
concealed intensity; and presently, flicking the cigarette ashes casually from
her gown, she asked, “And do you think it would be quite moral of me?”
He shrugged his shoulders and looked at her in astonishment, as if he
had expected her, least of all people in the world, to ask such a thing.
“It might,” he said, “make us both a great deal happier.”
“Perhaps ... perhaps not. It’s not so simple as that. Besides, it isn’t
happiness that one places first at Pentlands.”
“No.... Still....” He made a sudden vigorous gesture, as if to sweep aside
all objections.
“You’re a queer man.... I’ll see what can be done.”
He thanked her and went out shyly without another word, to stride across
the meadows, his black head bent thoughtfully, in the direction of his new
bright chimneys. At his heels trotted the springer, which had lain waiting
for him outside the door. There was something about the robust figure,
crossing the old meadow through the blue twilight, that carried a note of
lonely sadness. The self-confidence, the assurance, seemed to have melted
away in some mysterious fashion. It was almost as if one man had entered
the cottage a little while before and another, a quite different man, had left it
just now. Only one thing, Sabine saw, could have made the difference, and
that was the name of Olivia.

When he had disappeared Sabine went up to her room overlooking the

sea and lay there for a long time thinking. She was by nature an indolent
woman, especially at times when her brain worked with a fierce activity. It
was working thus now, in a kind of fever, confused and yet tremendously
clear; for the visits from Aunt Cassie and O’Hara had ignited her almost
morbid passion for vicarious experience. She had a sense of being on the
brink of some calamity which, beginning long ago in a hopeless tangle of
origins and motives, was ready now to break forth with the accumulated
force of years.
It was only now that she began to understand a little what it was that had
drawn her back to a place which held memories so unhappy as those
haunting the whole countryside of Durham. She saw that it must have been
all the while a desire for vindication, a hunger to show them that, in spite of
everything, of the straight red hair and the plain face, the silly ideas with
which they had filled her head, in spite even of her unhappiness over her
husband, she had made of her life a successful, even a brilliant, affair. She
had wanted to show them that she stood aloof now and impregnable, quite
beyond their power to curb or to injure her. And for a moment she
suspected that the half-discerned motive was an even stronger thing, akin
perhaps to a desire for vengeance; for she held this world about Durham
responsible for the ruin of her happiness. She knew now, as a worldly
woman of forty-six, that if she had been brought up knowing life for what it
was, she might never have lost the one man who had ever roused a genuine
passion in a nature so hard and dry.
It was all confused and tormented and vague, yet the visit of Aunt
Cassie, filled with implications and veiled attempts to humble her, had
cleared the air enormously.
 And behind the closed lids, the green eyes began to see a whole
procession of calamities which lay perhaps within her power to create. She
began to see how it might even be possible to bring the whole world of
Pentlands down about their heads in a collapse which could create only
freedom and happiness to Olivia and her daughter. And it was these two
alone for whom she had any affection; the others might be damned,
gloriously damned, while she stood by without raising a finger.
She began to see where the pieces of the puzzle lay, the wedges which
might force open the solid security of the familiar, unchanging world that
once more surrounded her.
Lying there in the twilight, she saw the whole thing in the process of
being fitted together and she experienced a sudden intoxicating sense of
power, of having all the tools at hand, of being the dea ex machinâ of the
calamity.
She was beginning to see, too, how the force, the power that had lain
behind all the family, was coming slowly to an end in a pale, futile
weakness. There would always be money to bolster up their world, for the
family had never lost its shopkeeping tradition of thrift; but in the end even
money could not save them. There came a time when a great fortune might
be only a shell without a desiccated rottenness inside.

She was still lying there when Thérèse came in—a short, plain, rather
stocky, dark girl with a low straight black bang across her forehead. She
was hot and soiled by the mud of the marshes, as the red-haired unhappy
little girl had been so many times in that far-off, half-forgotten childhood.
“Where have you been?” she asked indifferently, for there was always a
curious sense of strangeness between Sabine and her daughter.
“Catching frogs to dissect,” said Thérèse. “They’re damned scarce and I
slipped into the river.”
Sabine, looking at her daughter, knew well enough there was no chance
of marrying off a girl so queer, and wilful and untidy, in Durham. She saw
that it had been a silly idea from the beginning; but she found satisfaction in
the knowledge that she had molded Thérèse’s life so that no one could ever
hurt her as they had hurt her mother. Out of the queer nomadic life they had
led together, meeting all sorts of men and women who were, in Sabine’s
curious sense of the word, “complete,” the girl had pierced her way
somehow to the bottom of things. She was building her young life upon a
rock, so that she could afford to feel contempt for the very forces which
long ago had hurt her mother. She might, like O’Hara, be suddenly humbled
by love; but that, Sabine knew, was a glorious thing well worth suffering.
She knew it each time that she looked at her child and saw the clear gray
eyes of the girl’s father looking out of the dark face with the same proud
look of indifferent confidence which had fascinated her twenty years ago.
So long as Thérèse was alive, she would never be able wholly to forget him.
“Go wash yourself,” she said. “Old Mr. Pentland and Olivia and Mrs.
Soames are coming to dine and play bridge.”
As she dressed for dinner she no longer asked herself, “Why did I ever
imagine Thérèse might find a husband here? What ever induced me to come
back here to be bored all summer long?”
She had forgotten all that. She began to see that the summer held
prospects of diversion. It might even turn into a fascinating game. She knew
that her return had nothing to do with Thérèse’s future; she had been drawn
back into Durham by some vague but overwhelming desire for mischief.
 CHAPTER V

When Anson Pentland came down from the city in the evening, Olivia
was always there to meet him dutifully and inquire about the day. The
answers were always the same: “No, there was not much doing in town,”
and, “It was very hot,” or, “I made a discovery to-day that will be of great
use to me in the book.”
Then after a bath he would appear in tweeds to take his exercise in the
garden, pottering about mildly and peering closely with his near-sighted
blue eyes at little tags labeled “General Pershing” or “Caroline Testout” or
“Poincaré” or “George Washington” which he tied carefully on the new
dahlias and roses and smaller shrubs. And, more often than not, the
gardener would spend half the next morning removing the tags and placing
them on the proper plants, for Anson really had no interest in flowers and
knew very little about them. The tagging was only a part of his passion for
labeling things; it made the garden at Pentlands seem a more subdued and
ordered place. Sometimes it seemed to Olivia that he went through life
ticketing and pigeonholing everything that came his way: manners,
emotions, thoughts, everything. It was a habit that was growing on him in
middle-age.
Dinner was usually late because Anson liked to take advantage of the
long summer twilights, and after dinner it was the habit of all the family,
save Jack, who went to bed immediately afterward, to sit in the Victorian
drawing-room, reading and writing letters or sometimes playing patience,
with Anson in his corner at Mr. Lowell’s desk working over “The Pentland
Family and the Massachusetts Bay Colony,” and keeping up a prodigious
correspondence with librarians and old men and women of a genealogical
bent. The routine of the evening rarely changed, for Anson disliked going
out and Olivia preferred not to go alone. It was only with the beginning of
the summer, when Sybil was grown and had begun to go out occasionally to
dinners and balls, and the disturbing Sabine, with her passion for playing
bridge, had come into the neighborhood, that the routine was beginning to
break up. There were fewer evenings now with Olivia and Sybil playing
patience and old John Pentland sitting by the light of Mr. Longfellow’s
lamp reading or simply staring silently before him, lost in thought.
There were times in those long evenings when Olivia, looking up
suddenly and for no reason at all, would discover that Sybil was sitting in
the same fashion watching her, and both of them would know that they, like
old John Pentland, had been sitting there all the while holding books in their
hands without knowing a word of what they had read. It was as if a kind of
enchantment descended upon them, as if they were waiting for something.
Once or twice the silence had been broken sharply by the unbearable sound
of groans coming from the north wing when she had been seized suddenly
by one of her fits of violence.
Anson’s occasional comment and Olivia’s visits to Jack’s room to see
that nothing had happened to him were the only interruptions. They spoke
always in low voices when they played double patience in order not to
disturb Anson at his work. Sometimes he encountered a bit of information
for which he had been searching for a long time and then he would turn and
tell them of it.
There was the night when he made his discovery about Savina
Pentland....
“I was right about Savina Pentland,” he said. “She was a first cousin and
not a second cousin of Toby Cane.”
Olivia displayed an interest by saying, “Was that what you wrote to the
Transcript about?”
“Yes ... and I was sure that the genealogical editor was wrong. See ...
here it is in one of Jared Pentland’s letters at the time she was drowned....
Jared was her husband.... He refers to Toby Cane as her only male first
cousin.”
“That will help you a great deal,” said Olivia, “won’t it?”
“It will help clear up the chapter about the origins of her family.” And
then, after a little pause, “I wish that I could get some trace of the
correspondence between Savina Pentland and Cane. I’m sure it would be
full of things ... but it seems not to exist ... only one or two letters which tell
nothing.”
And then he relapsed again into a complete and passionate silence, lost
in the rustle of old books and yellowed letters, leaving the legend of Savina
Pentland to take possession of the others in the room.
 The memory of this woman had a way of stealing in upon the family
unaware, quite without their willing it. She was always there in the house,
more lively than any of the more sober ancestors, perhaps because of them
all she alone had been touched by splendor; she alone had been in her
reckless way a great lady. There was a power in her recklessness and
extravagance which came, in the end, to obscure all those other plain,
solemn-faced, thrifty wives whose portraits adorned the hall of Pentlands,
much as a rising sun extinguishes the feeble light of the stars. And about her
obscure origin there clung a perpetual aura of romance, since there was no
one to know just who her mother was or exactly whence she came. The
mother was born perhaps of stock no humbler than the first shopkeeping
Pentland to land on the Cape, but there was in her the dark taint of
Portuguese blood; some said that she was the daughter of a fisherman. And
Savina herself had possessed enough of fascination to lure a cautious
Pentland into eloping with her against the scruples that were a very fiber of
the Pentland bones and flesh.
The portrait of Savina Pentland stood forth among the others in the white
hall, fascinating and beautiful not only because the subject was a dark,
handsome woman, but because it had been done by Ingres in Rome during
the years when he made portraits of tourists to save himself from starvation.
It was the likeness of a small but voluptuous woman with great wanton dark
eyes and smooth black hair pulled back from a camellia-white brow and
done in a little knot on the nape of the white neck—a woman who looked
out of the old picture with the flashing, spirited glance of one who lived
boldly and passionately. She wore a gown of peach-colored velvet
ornamented with the famous parure of pearls and emeralds given her, to the
scandal of a thrifty family, by the infatuated Jared Pentland. Passing the
long gallery of portraits in the hallway it was always Savina Pentland whom
one noticed. She reigned there as she must have reigned in life, so bold and
splendorous as to seem a bit vulgar, especially in a world of such sober folk,
yet so beautiful and so spirited that she made all the others seem scarcely
worth consideration.
Even in death she had remained an “outsider,” for she was the only one
of the family who did not rest quietly among the stunted trees at the top of
the bald hill where the first Pentlands had laid their dead. All that was left
of the warm, soft body lay in the white sand at the bottom of the ocean
within sight of Pentlands. It was as if fate had delivered her in death into a
grave as tempestuous and violent as she had been in life. And somewhere
near her in the restless white sand lay Toby Cane, with whom she had gone
sailing one bright summer day when a sudden squall turned a gay excursion
into a tragedy.
Even Aunt Cassie, who distrusted any woman with gaze so bold and free
as that set down by the brush of Ingres—even Aunt Cassie could not
annihilate the glamour of Savina’s legend. For her there was, too, another,
more painful, memory hidden in the knowledge that the parure of pearls and
emeralds and all the other jewels which Savina Pentland had wrung from
her thrifty husband, lay buried somewhere in the white sand between her
bones and those of her cousin. To Aunt Cassie Savina Pentland seemed
more than merely a reckless, extravagant creature. She was an enemy of the
Pentland fortune and of all the virtues of the family.
The family portraits were of great value to Anson in compiling his book,
for they represented the most complete collection of ancestors existing in all
America. From the portrait of the emigrating Pentland, painted in a wooden
manner by some traveling painter of tavern signs, to the rather handsome
one of John Pentland, painted at middle-age in a pink coat by Sargent, and
the rather bad and liverish one of Anson, also by Mr. Sargent, the collection
was complete save for two—the weak Jared Pentland who had married
Savina, and the Pentland between old John’s father and the clipper-ship
owner, who had died at twenty-three, a disgraceful thing for any Pentland to
have done.
The pictures hung in a neat double row in the lofty hall, arranged
chronologically and without respect for lighting, so that the good ones like
those by Ingres and Sargent’s picture of old John Pentland and the
unfinished Gilbert Stuart of Ashur Pentland hung in obscure shadows, and
the bad ones like the tavern-sign portrait of the first Pentland were exposed
in a glare of brilliant light.
This father of all the family had been painted at the great age of eighty-
nine and looked out from his wooden background, a grim, hard-mouthed
old fellow with white hair and shrewd eyes set very close together. It was a
face such as one might find to-day among the Plymouth Brethren of some
remote, half-forgotten Sussex village, the face of a man notable only for the
toughness of his body and the rigidity of a mind which dissented from
everything. At the age of eighty-four, he had been cast out for dissension
from the church which he had come to regard as his own property.
Next to him hung the portrait of a Pentland who had been a mediocrity
and left not even a shadowy legend; and then appeared the insolent,
disagreeable face of the Pentland who had ducked eccentric old women for
witches and cut off the ears of peace-loving Quakers in the colony founded
in “freedom to worship God.”
The third Pentland had been the greatest evangelist of his time, a man
who went through New England holding high the torch, exhorting rude
village audiences by the coarsest of language to such a pitch of excitement
that old women died of apoplexy and young women gave birth to premature
children. The sermons which still existed showed him to be a man
uncultivated and at times almost illiterate, yet his vast energy had founded a
university and his fame as an exhorter and “the flaming sword of the Lord”
had traveled to the ignorant and simple-minded brethren of the English back
country.
The next Pentland was the eldest of the exhorter’s twenty children (by
four wives), a man who clearly had departed from his father’s counsels and
appeared in his portrait a sensual, fleshly specimen, very fat and almost
good-natured, with thick red lips. It was this Pentland who had founded the
fortune which gave the family its first step upward in the direction of the
gentility which had ended with the figure of Anson bending over “The
Pentland Family and the Massachusetts Bay Colony.” He had made a large
fortune by equipping privateers and practising a near-piracy on British
merchantmen; and there was, too, a dark rumor (which Anson intended to
overlook) that he had made as much as three hundred per cent profit on a
single shipload of negroes in the African slave trade.
After him there were portraits of two Pentlands who had taken part in the
Revolution and then another hiatus of mediocrity, including the gap
represented by the missing Jared; and then appeared the Anthony Pentland
who increased the fortune enormously in the clipper trade. It was the
portrait of a swarthy, powerful man (the first of the dark Pentlands, who
could all be traced directly to Savina’s Portuguese blood), painted by a
second-rate artist devoted to realism, who had depicted skilfully the warts
which marred the distinguished old gentleman. In the picture he stood in the
garden before the Pentland house at Durham with marshes in the
background and his prize clipper Semiramis riding, with all sail up, the
distant ocean.
Next to him appeared the portrait of old John Pentland’s father—a man
of pious expression, dressed all in black, with a high black stock and a wave
of luxuriant black hair, the one who had raised the family to really great
wealth by contracts for shoes and blankets for the soldiers at Gettysburg and
Bull Run and Richmond. After him, gentility had conquered completely,
and the Sargent portrait of old John Pentland at middle-age showed a man
who was master of hounds and led the life of a country gentleman, a man
clearly of power and character, whose strength of feature had turned slowly
into the bitter hardness of the old man who sat now in the light of Mr.
Longfellow’s lamp reading or staring before him into space while his son
set down the long history of the family.
The gallery was fascinating to strangers, as the visual record of a family
which had never lost any money (save for the extravagance of Savina
Pentland’s jewels), a family which had been the backbone of a community,
a family in which the men married wives for thrift and housewifely virtues
rather than for beauty, a family solid and respectable and full of honor. It
was a tribe magnificent in its virtue and its strength, even at times in its
intolerance and hypocrisy. It stood represented now by old John Pentland
and Anson, and the boy who lay abovestairs in the room next Olivia’s,
dying slowly.

At ten o’clock each night John Pentland bade them good-night and went
off to bed, and at eleven Anson, after arranging his desk neatly and placing
his papers in their respective files, and saying to Olivia, “I wouldn’t sit up
too late, if I were you, when you are so tired,” left them and disappeared.
Soon after him, Sybil kissed her mother and climbed the stairs past all the
ancestors.
It was only then, after they had all left her, that a kind of peace settled
over Olivia. The burdens lifted, and the cares, the worries, the thoughts that
were always troubling her, faded into the distance and for a time she sat
leaning back in the winged armchair with her eyes closed, listening to the
sounds of the night—the faint murmur of the breeze in the faded lilacs
outside the window, the creaking that afflicts very old houses in the night,
and sometimes the ominous sound of Miss Egan’s step traversing distantly