rom Washington
had interrupted our algebraic demonstration on the man subject. You
can't always be sure of the right answer to X in any proposition of
life; that is, a woman can't!

And, furthermore, I didn't like that next hour much, just as a sample of
life, for instance. Aunt Bettie had got her joining-together humor well
started, and right there before my face she made a present of every nice
man in Hillsboro to that lovely, distinguished, strange girl who could
have slipped through a bucket hoop if she had tried hard. I had to sit
there, listen to the presentations, watch her drink two tall delicious
glasses of tea full of sugar and consume without fear three of Judy's
puffy cakes, while I crumbled mine in secret over the banisters and set
half the glass of tea out of sight behind the wistaria vine.

It was bad enough to hear Aunt Bettie just offer her Tom, who, if he is
her own son, is my favorite cousin, but I believe the worst minute I
almost ever faced was when she began on the judge, for I could see from
Aunt Adeline's shoulder beyond Miss Chester how she was enjoying that,
and she added another distinguished ancestor to his pedigree every time
Aunt Bettie paused for breath. I couldn't say a word about the fish and
Aunt Adeline wouldn't! I almost loved Mrs. Johnson when she bit off a
thread viciously and said, "Humph," as she rose to start the tea-party
home.

That night I did so many exercises that at last I sank exhausted in a
chair in front of my mirror and put my head down on my arms and cried
the real tears you cry when nobody is looking. I felt terribly old and
ugly and dowdy and--widowed. It couldn't have been jealousy, for I just
love that girl. I want most awfully to hug her very slimness and it
was more what she might think of poor dumpy me than what any man in
Hillsboro, Tennessee, or Paris, France, could possibly feel on the
subject that hurt so hard. But then, looking back on it, I am afraid
that jealousy sheds feathers every night so you won't know him in the
morning, for something made me sit up suddenly with a spark in my eyes
and reach out to the desk for my pencil and check-book. It took me more
than an hour to figure it all up, but I went to bed a happier, though
in prospects a poorer woman.

It is strange how spending a man's money makes you feel more congenial
with him and as I sat in the cars on my way to the city early the next
morning I felt nearer to Mr. Carter than I almost ever d