SHAPING OF MOLLY

Leaning back in the uncomfortable plush-covered chair in the train to
Richmond, Molly watched the flat landscape glide past, while she thought
a little wistfully of the morning she had made this same trip dressed
in one of Mrs. Gay's gowns. On her knees Mrs. Gay's canary, extinguished
beneath the black silk cover to his cage, uttered from time to time a
feeble pipe of inquiry, and on the rack above her head Mrs. Gay's tea
basket rattled loudly in a sudden lurch of the train. Since the hour in
which she had left the overseer's cottage and moved into the "big house"
at Jordan's Journey, the appealing little lady had been the dominant
influence in her life--an influence so soft and yet so overpowering that
she had at times a sensation of being smothered in scented swansdown.
For several months after leaving Old Church her education had absorbed
her energies, and she had found time merely to gasp occasionally in
the oppressive sweetness of the atmosphere which Mrs. Gay's personality
diffused. Everything was strange then, and her desire for strangeness,
for unfamiliar impressions, had amounted to a passion. She had been very
anxious, too, very much afraid lest she should make a mistake. When she
had entered the hotel dining-room in New York she had felt as if she
were walking on ploughed ground, and the red velvet carpet had seemed
to rise and sink under her feet. That first night had been exquisite
torture to her, and so, she surmised through some intuitive
understanding, had it been to Kesiah. For weeks after that time
of embarrassment, she had watched herself carefully--watched every
instant--and in the end she had triumphed. With her growing ease,
her old impulsiveness had returned to her, and with the wonderful
adaptability of the Southern woman, she had soon ceased to feel a sense
of discomfort in her changed surroundings. The instinct of class she had
never had, and this lack of social reverence had helped her not a
little in her ascent of the ladder. It is difficult to suffer from a
distinction which one does not admit--and her perfect unconsciousness of
inferiority to Mrs. Gay had placed her, without her being aware of it,
in the position of an equal.

With her hands clasped on the cage of the canary, she gazed thoughtfully
at Kesiah, who was sitting a little in front of her, with her eyeglasses
on her nose and the daily paper opened before her. Gay was to meet them
in Richmond, and as Molly rem