d, right where I can put my hand on it if life suddenly
panics me for any reason. It covers all the circumstances I have yet
met. I wonder if I ought to burn it now!

But, to be honest with myself, I will have to confess that the
explosively sentimental scene on the front porch, the night I left for
college, with Polk Hayes has had something to do with my cowardice in
lingering in foreign climes. I feel that it is something I will have to
go on with some day, and the devil will have to pick up the chips. Polk
is the kind of man that ought to be exterminated by the government in
sympathy for its women wards, if his clan didn't make such good citizens
when they do finally marry. He ought at least to be labeled "poison for
the very young." I was very young out on the porch that night. Still, I
don't resent him like I do the archaic Crag.

And as Jane talked, my seasoned indignation of four years against my
keeper flared up, and while she paused at intervals for breath I hurled
out plans for his demolishment. I wish now I had been more
conservatively quiet, and left myself a loophole, but I didn't. I walked
into this situation and shut the door behind me.

"Yes, Evelina, I think you will have to insist forcibly on assuming
charge of your own social and financial affairs in your own home. It may
not be easy, with such a man as you describe, but you will accomplish
it. However, many mediocre women have proved their ability to attend to
their own fortunes, and do good business for themselves; but your battle
is to be fought on still higher grounds. You are to rise and establish
with your fellow-man a plane of common citizenship. You do it for his
sake and your own, and for that of humanity."

"Suppose, after I get up there on that plateau, I didn't find any man at
all," I ventured faint-heartedly, but with a ripple of my risibles; the
last in life I fear.

"You must reach down your hands to them and draw them up to you," she
answered in a tone of tonic inspiration. "You are to claim the same
right to express your emotions that a man has. You are to offer your
friendship to both men and women on the same frank terms, with no
degrading hesitancy caused by an embarrassment on account of your sex.
It is his due and yours. No form of affection is to be withheld from
him. It is to be done frankly and impressively, and when the time
comes--" I can hardly write this, but the memory of the wonderful though
fanatic light in Jane's