The curious feature of Callista Gentry's following was, that it 3 included as many young women as young men, and the chariot wheels of her mates looked robbed always, because, inferentially, the man who courted any other would rather have Callista Gentry if he might.
Coached and forwarded, exploited and made the most of ever since she could remember; a bright, pretty child, and a dutiful student, during her brief days of country schooling; her mother had from infancy enforced all the rural arts of beauty culture to make her what she was. Long home-knitted yarn gloves were worn to protect the shapely hands and whiten them. The grand big mane of ashen-blond hair was washed in fresh-caught rainwater, clipped in the dark of the moon, combed and tended and kept as no one else's hair was. Her sunbonnets were never the long-caped ungainly affairs commonly seen; they took on, whether by accident or design one could hardly say, the coquetry of a wood violet half-blown; and when these were not in use, a broad hat shaded the exquisite fairness of the oval cheek. Callista had grown up a delicate court lady, smooth and fine to look upon, pink and white and golden, like one of those rare orchids, marvelously veined and featured, known only to the bees of the wood, whose loveliness is always ashiver with peculiar vitality. This Sunday morning the lepidopteral flutter of gay calicoes, and the bee-like murmur of young male voices in her court of 4 youths and maidens, carried out well the figure of the rare, moth-bewitching blossom.
"I wish't Lance Cleaverage'd come—then we'd see fun!" cried Buck Fuson, rising to his knees and gazing across the slope. "I'd ruther hear him and Callista fuss as to eat my dinner. Them two has the masterest arguments I ever heared outside of a law-court."
Brown little Ola Derf, sitting slightly apart from the others braiding pine needles into a ring, looked up suddenly. A woman at the spring below scooping a drink for a fat child, lifted a long drab face and sighted in the same direction. This was the Widow Griever, elder sister of Lance Cleaverage. Sour censor of public morals that she was, Roxy Griever considered eighteen-year-old Callista the young woman perfect, and found her own brother quite unworthy of the paragon. Only the central figure of the group appeared to take no notice, while the girls about her, at the mere mention of Lance, all fluttered and resettled themselves with a certain vague air of expectancy.
"You boys ought to be ashamed of yo'se'fs," Roxy Griever reproved. Then apart to young Fuson, "Callista's got more sense than to pay any attention to such a light-headed somebody as that fool brother o' mine. Let me tell you, Callista Gentry has more sense than any of you men persons give her credit for. 5 She's a serious-minded gal. You Mary Ann Marthy, you quit treadin' over yo' Sunday shoes." And she raised her small daughter a bit from the pathway and set her down sharply, as though to indicate the correct manner of walking in Sunday foot-gear.
The infant of the triple name—her Uncle Lance said she sounded like twins if she didn't look it—put up a mutinous red mouth and lowered from under flaxen brows.
"Me wants to hear 'em fuss," she muttered as she progressed reluctantly toward the little church on the hill-side.
"Well, you ain't goin' to hear 'em fuss, and they ain't goin' to fuss, and you couldn't hear 'em if they did," admonished her mother lucidly, accelerating the infant's pace from the rear. "The big spring ain't no place for chillen like you, and old women like me. Let the light-minded and the ungodly do about in such ef they will. You and me is goin' into the church house and set thar till preachin'."
Fathers and mothers were herding their broods of lesser children in, but boys and girls of older growth, young men and women of an age to be thinking of mating, strolled by twos or sat on the bank above the big spring that supplied the baptismal pool of Brush Arbor church. Callista Gentry was wearing a new print frock—and looking quite unconscious of the fact.
"That ain't no five cent lawn," whispered Ola Derf enviously, as 6 she eyed it from afar. The Derf girl was an outsider at most gatherings, and particularly so at church affairs. Everybody knew she came to Brush Arbor only on a chance of seeing Lance Cleaverage.