"I was round with Cousin Robert at the office last night, going over the books and the chances with him."
Here he waved a car. It was a belt line and went the long way round, but in its own good time would get them to their home neighborhood.
He led her out to the track, put her on the car, and followed. "How'd you know?" he asked as he sat down by her. "Cousin Robert told me he wouldn't mention it to any of you at the house till matters were decided."
"He ought to have told it at home from the start," she cried, and explained how she knew and they talked it and the situation at home over in their sorry details. Then she burst forth again, the more passionately that being here on the street-car, it must be restrainedly.
"Look at me, Culpepper? What am I? What am I fit for? What am I able to do as anything should be done? I've been given no way at all to earn my living. I've never been allowed to order a meal, or go to market to fit me even that way. I've never drawn a check, and I've never paid a bill. I'm past nineteen and at as pitiful a beginning as I was at sixteen."
She swallowed, looking ahead, her eyes fixed absently on the only other passenger in the car at the moment. Her profile thus was to Culpepper and he loved it. Fair and clear-cut and fine, he had loved it in her when she was a child.
She was seeing not the other passenger at all at whom she gazed so bitterly, poor man, but a grievance because of which she was passionately rebellious.
"You were made ready from the start, Culpepper; everybody concerned saw to it you were prepared. I'm hard about it. I'm resentful. I accuse—who or what is it I do accuse?" piteously. "Mamma? Papa? Conditions? The system? If there is any system for bringing up girls, and it isn't all just haphazard! And Culpepper, at home they're all so helpless! Mamma and Auntie! And Papa's so sensitive and is going to grow pitiful under this second failure and the having to take, as I suppose he will, some little clerkship, somebody'll be charitable enough to give him. It's up to me. And I want it to be up to me. You must see that the whole measure of what I'll ever be depends on my seeing right now that it is up to me. And, Oh, what way is there for me to meet it?"