you for a single solitary minute, and they miss you
and wish you'd come back; and they send you their dear, dear love--and
I'll carry your dear, dear love back to them!' So if you see a big,
big, beautiful, strange fellow come sailing by your window some
morning, why, that's mine, Mr. Flint! Remember!"

And then she was gone, and he had his first taste of unselfish human
sorrow. Heretofore his worries had been purely personal and
self-centered: this was different, and innocent. It shocked and
terrified him to find out how intensely he could miss another being,
and that being a mere child. He wasn't used to that sort of pain, and
it bewildered him.

Eustis himself had wanted the little girl sent to a preparatory school
which would fit her for one of the women's colleges. He had visions of
the forward sweep of women--visions which his wife didn't share. Her
daughter should go to the Church School at which she herself had been
educated, an exclusive and expensive institution where the daughters
of the wealthy were given a finishing hand-polish with ecclesiastical
emery, as a sort of social hall-mark. Mrs. Eustis had a horror of what
she called, in quotation-marks, the modern non-religious method of
educating young ladies.

The Eustis house was closed, and left in charge of the negro
caretakers, for Mrs. Eustis couldn't stand the loneliness of the place
after the child's departure, and Eustis himself found his presence
more and more necessary at the great plantation he was building up.
Mrs. Eustis left Appleboro, and my mother missed her. There was a vein
of pure gold underlying the placid little woman's character, which the
stronger woman divined and built upon.

Laurence, too, entered college that Fall. I had coached him, in such
hours as I could spare. He was conscientious enough, though his Greek
was not the Greek of Homer and he vexed the soul of my mother with a
French she said was spoke

full fair and fetisly
After ye schole of Strattford atte Bowe.

But if he hadn't Mary Virginia's sensitiveness to all beauty, nor her
playful fancy and vivid imagination, he was clear-brained and
clean-thinking, with that large perspective and that practical
optimism which seem to me so essentially American. He saw without
confusion both the thing as it was and as it could become. With only
enough humor to save him, he had a sternness more of the puritan than
of the cavalier blood from which he had sprung. Above all w