e shall never be separated.
I will give up the thought of marriage and live for you two."

Mrs. Custis made a gesture of impatience.

"And be an old maid!" she blurted. "That is insufferable. What are all
these accomplishments and charms for but a husband, and what is he for
but to provide bread and clothes. Don't be as crazy as your unprincipled
father! Try no experiments! Drop philanthropy! Money is the foundation
of all respectability."

Vesta thought to herself: "Can that be so? Does it not, then, justify
the man who solicits me in his means of getting money? Mother"--Vesta
spoke--"you would have me marry, then?"

"There is no would about it," answered Mrs. Custis. "You _must_ marry!"

"Marry immediately?"

"Yes, the sooner the better, to a rich man. Have you picked out one?"

"Give me your blessing, and I will try," Vesta said; "I think I know
such a one."

Mrs. Custis kissed her daughter, and moaned about her poor head and lost
marriage portion, and Vesta set out to look for her father.

She found him as described, in the luxury of tears and squab, as
comfortable among his negro servants as in the state legislature or at
the head of society, and they wrapped up in his condescension and
misfortunes.

As Vesta saw the curious scene of such patriarchal democracy in the old
kitchen, she wondered if that voluptuous endowment of her father was not
the happy provision to make marriage unions tolerable, and social
revulsions philosophical. Something of regret that she had not more of
the animal faintly grew upon her sad smile when she considered that
wherever her father went he made welcome and warmth, as she already felt
at the picture of him, after parting with her apathetic mother.

"Roxy," said Vesta, as she left the kitchen, "do you go up to my mother
and stay with her all this night. Make your spread there beside her bed.
Virgie, put on your hood and carry a letter for me,--I will write it in
the library."

She sat before her father, he too undecided to speak, and seeing by her
fixed expression that it was no time for loquacity. She sealed the
letter with wax, and, Virgie coming in, her father heard the direction
she gave with curiosity greater than his embarrassment:

"Take this to Rev. William Tilghman. Give it to him only, and see that
he reads it, Virgie, before you leave him. If he asks you any questions,
tell him please to do precisely what this note says, and, as he is my
friend, not to disapp