s save yourself.' I'll take care of you if I can, but your
father may starve for any aid I will give him."

"Then he shall have the only aid in my power, mother," said Vesta,
decisively.

"Your aid!" Mrs. Custis exclaimed. "What have you got? Your jewels, I
suppose? How long will they keep him? You had better keep your jewels,
girl, for your wedding, and have it come quickly, for marriage is now
your only salvation."

"My last jewel shall go, then," Vesta said, with a pale resolution that
darted through her veins like ice.

"Save your jewels," Mrs. Custis continued, "and choose a husband before
this thing is noised abroad! You have a good large list to select from.
There is your cousin, Chase McLane, crazy for you, and with an estate in
Kent. There is that young fool Carroll, with thousands of acres on the
western shore, and the widower Hynson of King George, Virginia, with
eighty slaves and his stables full of race-horses. You can marry any of
these Dennis boys, or take Captain Ringgold of Frederick, who lives in
elegance at West Point, or be mistress of Tench Purvience's mansion on
Monument Square in Baltimore. All you have to do is to write a letter,
saying: 'I expect you,' or, what is better, take to-morrow's steamer for
Baltimore and use your Uncle Allan's house and become engaged and
married there."

"Mamma," Vesta spoke without rebuke, only with a sad, confirmed feeling
of her destiny, "I could be capable of deceiving any of those gentlemen
if I could so heartlessly leave my father."

"Deceiving!" Mrs. Custis remarked, filling her palm and brow with the
cologne. "What is man's whole work with a woman but deceit? To court her
for her money, to kiss her into taking her money out of good mortgages
and putting it into bog iron ore? To tell her when past middle life that
she has nothing to live upon, except the charity of the public, or her
reluctant friends. All this for an experiment! The Custis family are all
knaves or fools. Your father is a monster."

Vesta went to her mother's side and bathed her forehead.

"Dear mamma," she said, "let you and I do something for ourselves, while
papa looks around and finds something to do. We can rent a house in
Princess Anne and open a seminary. I can teach French and music, you can
be the matron and do the correspondence and business, and if papa is at
a loss for larger occupation he can lecture on history and science. Our
friends will send their children to us, and w