, I care too much about you to let you marry a woman in search
of a roof and food," I answered him, with all of the affection I seemed to
possess at that time in my eyes. "You deserve better than that from me."

"Now, see here, Ann Craddock, did I or did I not ask you to marry me at
your fourteenth birthday party, which was just ten years ago, and did you
or did you not tell me just to wait until you got grown? Have you or have
you not reached the years of discretion and decision? I am ready to marry,
I am!" And as he made this announcement of his matrimonially inclined
condition of mind, Matthew took my hand in his and laid his cheek against
it.

"My heart isn't grown up yet, Matt," I said softly, with all the tenderness
I, as I before remarked, at that time possessed. "Don't wait for me. Marry
Belle Proctor or somebody and--and bring the--babies out to Elmnest for--"

The explosion that then followed landed me in Owen Murray's arms on the
floor of the ball-room, and landed Matthew in his big racing-car, which I
could hear go roaring down the road beyond the golf-links.

There is a certain kind of woman whose brain develops with amazing
normality and strength, but whose heart remains very soft-fibered and
uncertain, with tendencies to lapse into second childhood. I am that garden
variety, and it took the exercising of many heart interests to toughen my
cardiac organ.

As I traveled out the long turnpike that wound itself through the Harpeth
Valley to the very old and tradition-mossed town of Riverfield, in the
high, huge-wheeled, swinging old coach of my Great-grandmother Craddock,
sitting pensively alone while father occupied the front seat beside Uncle
Cradd, both of them in deep converse about a line in Tom Moore, while Uncle
Cradd bumbled the air of "Drink to me only with thine eyes" in a lovely old
bass, I should have been softly and pensively weeping at the thought of the
devastation of my father's fortune, of the poverty brought down upon his
old age, and about my fate as a gay social being going thus into exile; but
I wasn't. Did I say that I was sitting alone in state upon the faded rose
leather of those ancestral cushions? That was not the case, for upon the
seat beside me rode the Golden Bird in a beautiful crate, which bore the
legend, "Cock, full brother to Ladye Rosecomb, the world's champion,
three-hundred-and-fourteen-egg hen, insured at one thousand dollars.
Express sixteen dollars." And in another