"Charles came home," she explained, looking into her lap, "after four or five years of college, imbued with the idea that I was his property.... He acted as if he owned me!" she blurted indignantly.
"Well, doesn't he?" asked Jean François, innocently.
"Doesn't he! Doesn't he!" she flung at him. "That's just what grandfather asked."
"And your Aunt Barbara?" he queried humorously.
"Aunt Barbara," she continued with fine sarcasm, "my precise, correct, conventional Aunt Barbara, who will not acknowledge, Jean François, that she has such vulgar things as legs; this dear, darling devotee of propriety actually pointed to herself as a horrible example of a too-exacting young woman!... My Aunt Barbara is a silly old ass!"
"How you do mix your genders when you become excited, my dear-a."
"You're a goose!" she exclaimed. "A darling, old adorable goose.... You never liked my Aunt Barbara."
"But my question, Nance ... I thought things were all decided years ago. Do tell me."
"Dr. Charles Reubelt King," she pronounced the name with withering scorn, "was disgustingly presumptuous. He treated me as if he were feeling the pulse of the world and was just about to administer to it the particular pill which would cure all of its ills.... I despise pompousness, pedantry, and unconscious condescension in a man.... As for me—well, if he didn't say it, he acted it. I was nothing. I knew nothing. At my best I was but a red-headed spiritualized slave—and not always quite spiritualized!... I knew nothing!"