For these reasons, and for others, Katharine had her moments of despondency.

The glorious past, in which men and women grew to unexampled size, intruded too much upon the present, and dwarfed it too consistently, to be altogether encouraging to one forced to make her experiment in living when the great age was dead.
She was drawn to dwell upon these matters more than was natural, in the first place owing to her mother's absorption in them, and in the second because a great part of her time was spent in imagination with the dead, since she was helping her mother to produce a life of the great poet.
When Katharine was seventeen or eighteen--that is to say, some ten years ago--her mother had enthusiastically announced that now, with a daughter to help her, the biography would soon be published.

Notices to this effect found their way into the literary papers, and for some time Katharine worked with a sense of great pride and achievement.
Lately, however, it had seemed to her that they were making no way at all, and this was the more tantalizing because no one with the ghost of a literary temperament could doubt but that they had materials for one of the greatest biographies that has ever been written.

Shelves and boxes bulged with the precious stuff.

The most private lives of the most interesting people lay furled in yellow bundles of close-written manuscript.