estion of money.
According to the books she had read, that solitary state belonged to
old, disappointed bachelors, old maids, faded people generally. Here
she sat, a picture unseen, playing at age--and she less than
twenty-two. There was a kind of delicate incongruity about it all. And
watching her own grey eyes, as they faced her in the mirror, she half
comprehended why she continued to live so, even after her father died
and took away the reason for her old solitude. She had been under the
hypnotic suggestion of an event, an impression. That moment on
Montgomery street, when she found her father lying drunk, when tragedy
and responsibility came together--that moment had stretched itself out
to six years. She had lived by it; was living by it now.

In some unaccountable fashion, that picture would intertwine itself
with the impression, so new and vivid, which she had received that
afternoon. Momentarily, both united to produce one emotion--profound
disgust and dislike for the coarseness, the brutality, of male
humanity, which had laid her father out on the pavement for the sport
of a mob, which had made this perturbing young man trample on all
considerations and delicacies.

"You need not mind about dessert, Maria," she called out suddenly. She
rose, hurried out of doors, tore into the inspection of fruit crates
for to-morrow's picking.

Night, falling with little twilight, as always in those climes, found
her still ranging the house and barnyard, the rose incongruously in
her hair, the ribbon at her throat. When it was too dark to find
employment out of doors, she hurried back to the house, tried to read.
But a sense of confinement drove her forth. She started out toward the
road, stopped by the hedge gate, sat down finally on a bench under her
grape arbor. The leaves and the bunches of swelling fruit hid her from
sight of the highway, overshadowed at that point by a great bay tree.

A confusion of voices, masculine and feminine, sounded in the
distance. She caught a shrill, rowdy laugh. "The cutting-women and
their men," she thought dimly. That social phenomenon of the picking
season, grown accustomed by six years of passing summers and winters,
drew no special attention from her. But the noise continued; it became
plain that these reveling laborers were making in her direction.
Doubtless, they came from the women's camp at Judge Tiffany's. The
night was bringing her peace and sleep of the soul after a disturbing