e to put down in her own words what Mary
Virginia told the Butterfly Man and me. Also, I have had to fill in
gaps here and there, supplying what was lacking, from my intimate
knowledge of the actors and from such chance words and hints and bits
of detail as came to me afterward. But what I have added has been
necessary, in order to do greater justice to everybody concerned.

If it be true that the boy is father to the man, it is even more
tritely true that the girl is mother to the woman, there being here
less chance for change. So it was with Mary Virginia. That gracious
little girlhood of hers, lived among the birds and bees and blossoms
of an old Carolina garden, had sent her into the Church School with a
settled and definite idealism as part of her nature. Her creed was
simple enough: The world she knew was the best of all possible worlds,
its men good, its women better; and to be happy and loved one had only
to be good and loving.

The school did not disabuse her of this pleasing optimism. It was a
very expensive school and could afford to have optimisms of its own.
For one thing, it had no pupils poor enough to apply the acid test.

When Mary Virginia was seventeen, Mrs. Eustis perceived with dismay
that her child who had promised beauty was instead become angular,
awkward, and self-conscious; and promptly packed the unworldly one off
to spend a saving summer with a strenuously fashionable cousin, a
widow, of whom she herself was very fond. She liked the idea of
placing the gauche girl under so vigorous and seasoned a wing as
Estelle Baker's. As for Mrs. Baker herself, that gay and good-humored
lady laughed at the leggy and serious youngster and promptly took her
education in hand along lines not laid down in Church Schools.

Mrs. Baker was delighted with her own position--the reasonably young,
handsome, and wealthy widow of a man she had been satisfied to marry
and later to bury. She had an unimpaired digestion and no illusions, a
kind heart, and the power of laughter. Naturally, she found life
interesting. A club-woman, an ultra-modernist, vitally alive, she was
fully abreast of her day. Her small library skimmed the cream of the
insurgents and revolutionaries of genius; and here the shy and
reticent schoolgirl with the mark of the churchly checkrein fresh upon
her, was free to browse, for her cousin had no slightest notion of
playing censor. Mrs. Baker thought that the sooner one was allowed to
slough off t