left me there doing
little things like making speeches before the United States Senate and
running for Governor of Tennessee, after I had, single-handed, remade
the archaic constitution of that proud and bat-blind old State of my
birth; but such ease was not for me.

Of course for years, as all women have been doing who are sensible
enough to use the brains God gave them and stop depending on their
centuries-seasoned intuitions and fascinations, I have been reading
about this feminist revolution that seems all of a sudden to have
revoluted from nobody knows where, and I have been generally indignant
over things whether I understood them or not, and I have felt that I was
being oppressed by the opposite sex, even if I could not locate the
exact spot of the pain produced. I have always felt that when I got to
it I would shake off the shackles of my queer fondness and of my
dependence upon my oppressors, and do something revengeful to them.

When my father died in my Junior year and left me all alone in the
world, the first thing that made me feel life in my veins again was the
unholy rage I experienced when I found that he had left me bodaciously
and otherwise to my fifth cousin, James Hardin.

Cousin James is a healthy reversion to the primitive type of Father
Abraham, and he has so much aristocratic moss on him that he reminds me
of that old gray crag that hangs over Silver Creek out on Providence
Road. Artistically he is perfectly beautiful in an Old-Testament
fashion. He lives in an ancient, rambling house across the road from my
home, and he is making a souvenir collection of derelict women.
Everybody that dies in Glendale leaves him a relict, and including his
mother, Cousin Martha, he now has either seven or nine female charges,
depending on the sex of Sallie Carruthers's twin babies, which I can't
exactly remember, but will wager is feminine.

My being left to him was an insult to me, though of course Father did
not see it that way. He adored the Crag, as everybody else in Glendale
does, and wouldn't have considered not leaving him precious me. Wanting
to ignore Cousin James, because I was bound out to him until my
twenty-fifth year or marriage, which is worse, has kept me from Glendale
all these four years since father died suddenly while I was away at
college, laid up with the ankle which I broke in the gymnasium. Still,
as much as I resent him, I keep the letter the Crag wrote me the night
after Father die