hat respect, please God!

She did her duty so well in that respect that the Hynds fortune,
which even civil war and reconstruction hadn't been able altogether
to wreck, dwindled to a mere fifteen thousand dollars; and she
wasn't on speaking terms with anybody but Judge Gatchell, her
lawyer. She would have quarreled with him, too, had she dared.

To the minister, who bearded her for her soul's sake every now and
then, she spoke in words brief and curt:

"You here again? Wanted to see me, hey? Well, you've done it. Now
get out!"

And in the meantime the years passed and my own immediate family
passed with them; but still the gaunt old woman lived on in her
gaunt old house, becoming in time a myth to me, and to Hyndsville as
well; where they referred to her, succinctly, as "the Scarlet
Witch." I heard from her directly only once, and that was the year
she sent me a red flannel petticoat for a Christmas present. After
that, as if she'd done her worst, she ignored me altogether.

My mother had wanted me to be a school-teacher, in her eyes the acme
of respectability. But as it happens, there are two things I
wouldn't be: one's a school-teacher, the other a minister's wife.
If I had to marry the average minister, I should infallibly hate all
church-goers; if I had to teach the average school-child and wrestle
with the average school-board, I should end by burning joss-sticks
to Herod.

So I disappointed my mother by becoming a typist. After her death I
secured a foothold in a New York house--I'd always wanted to live in
New York--and went up, step by step, from what may be called a
rookie in the outside office, to private secretary to the Head. And
I'd been a business woman for all of seventeen years when Great-Aunt
Sophronisba Scarlett departed at the age of ninety-eight years and
eleven months, and willed that I should take up my life in the house
where she had dropped hers.

"Oh, Sophy!" cried Alicia Gaines, the one person in the world who
didn't call me Miss Smith. "Oh, Sophy, it's like a fairy-story come
true! Think of falling heir to an old, old, old lady's old, old, old
house, in South Carolina! I hope there's a big old door with a
fan-light, and a Greeky front with white pillars, and a big old
hall, and a big old garden--"

"And an old stove that smokes and old windows that rattle and an old
roof that leaks, and maybe big, big old rats that squeak o' nights,"
I said darkly. For the first rapture of the aston