He felt Mary Lee's lack of advantages more than she did. With the exception of a few excursions into the country, she had lived all her seventeen years in this dingy little house on a side street. Her mother had been her only teacher, and the men and women found in the books of her father's library her only companions. Mary Lee was a sociable creature; she longed for the companionship of girls of her own age. To be a debutante, to have the seasons filled with a round of visiting and receiving, to meet brilliant people, and to number one's friends by the score—this to her simple little heart seemed the height of happiness.
Now for the first time in her life she was to have a taste of it. Miss Travis Dent had invited her to spend a month with her at Wicklett Springs, a fashionable summer resort, in a house full of interesting people, whose sayings and doings were already familiar to her through the society columns of the daily papers. She was to be Travis's guest. The rest of it, the railroad expenses, the new trunk and the new clothes which footed up to such an enormous sum in her eyes, were of her father's giving, and she promised herself a happiness in proportion to the sacrifice he had made to provide for her.
"Hurry, Mary Lee!" called her mother, again. At the second call there was a light rustle through the hall, and the bright face looking in at the door seemed to transform all its surroundings.
"I couldn't come any sooner, mother dear, for admiring myself in my new travelling-clothes. Oh, I'm such a fine peacock in all my fine feathers!" she said, pausing to give her father a quick hug before she took her place at the table. "Do tell me that I look like a real born-to-the-purple, tailor-made girl."
Her father looked at her critically from the crown of her simple travelling-hat to the tips of her little shoes, and there was an unmistakable gleam of pride in his eyes as he completed his survey. "Yes, you do," he said, slowly. "You would pass muster anywhere. I don't mean your clothes alone; but it is written all over you, so plainly that even a stranger must see at a glance, 'This is a real little lady!'"
A little later they were bidding each other good-bye on a parlour car in the Union Depot. Travis Dent had joined them.
"I could not send my little girl in better company," thought Mr. Marker, as he shook hands with the serene young woman who came forward to meet them, with a sweet unconsciousness of self in her greeting. There were depths in Travis Dent's grave, gray eyes that bespoke a strong, self-reliant character.
The train was beginning to move. Mary Lee waved a last good-bye and went back to Travis. Settling herself luxuriously in the big cushioned chair, she smiled across at her friend. "Isn't it lovely!" she exclaimed. "I want to begin a letter home this minute and tell them the good times have begun."
For ten summers the ancestral home of the Wickletts had been turned into a boarding-house, but apparently it ignored the change with the same high-born ease of manner that characterised its gentle old mistress. The hospitality it extended to its paying guests was the same with which it welcomed its many visitors in ante-bellum days. And Miss Philura Wicklett was the same. They were wonderfully alike, the aristocratic old mansion and Miss Philura. Indeed, one could scarcely think of her apart from her familiar background of tall, white pillars, as stately and dignified as herself. The old portraits looking down on the faces round the great polished table, saw familiar ones, for the same family types were repeated there year after year among the boarders that had been welcomed at Wicklett generations before. The long mirrors, reflecting dimly the young faces peering into them now, had flashed back the smiles of mothers and grandmothers of these girls many a time, when gay house parties thronged the old mansion.