She was an example, so High Town said, of what a girl could make of herself, though as a matter of fact better backing than Patsy had for her achievement it would be hard to find. Her father and mother were of the reliable Scotch stock which had come a hundred years before to the country near Sabinsport. Here Patsy’s grandfather had settled and prospered. Here her father had been born and here he still carried on the original McCullon farm. He had married a “native” like himself, and like himself well-to-do. They had worked hard and they had to show for their efforts as comfortable and attractive a place as the district boasted—not a “show farm,” like Ralph Cowder’s, but clean, generous acres—many of them—substantial buildings always shining with fresh paint, herds of cattle and flocks of sheep, gardens, vines, orchards.
The McCullons had one child, Patsy. You’d go far to find anything firmer on its feet than Patsy McCullon, anything that knew better its own mind or went more promptly and directly after the thing it wanted. Patsy was twenty-four. Since the hour she was born, she had been her own mistress. When she was ten she had elected to go into town to school. When she was sixteen she had graduated, and the next year she had gone to college. Her father and mother had put in a feeble protest. They needed her. She was an only child. They had “enough.” Why not settle down? But Patsy said firmly, No. She was going to “prepare to do something.” When they asked her what, she said quite frankly she didn’t know. She’d see. She knew the first thing was education and she meant to have it. She’d teach and pay back if they said so, but Father McCullon hastened to say that it “wasn’t necessary.” He guessed she could have what she wanted. And so Patsy had gone East to college. She had graduated with honor two years before the war and had come back to Sabinsport to take a position in the high school.
If Patsy had been able to analyze the motives back of her career to date she would have found the dominating one to have been a determination to make Sabinsport—select, rich, satisfied Sabinsport—take her in. She had been, as a little girl, conscious that these handsome, well-dressed, citified people, whose origin was in no case better and often not so good as her own—Father McCullon took care that Patsy knew the worst of the forebears of those in town who held their heads so high—regarded her as a little country girl, something intangibly different and inferior to themselves. When they stopped at the farm, as they so often did in pleasant weather to eat strawberries in summer and apples in the fall, to drink buttermilk and gather “country posies,” as they called them, she had been vaguely offended by their ways.
When she insisted at ten upon going into town to school, it was with an unconscious resolve to find out what made them “different”—what secret had they for making her father and mother so proud of their visits, and why didn’t her father and mother drop in as they did? She suggested it once when they were in town, and had been told, “No, you can’t do that. We’ve not been asked.”
“But they come to visit you without being asked.”
“But that’s different. We are country people. Visitors are always welcome in the country. City people don’t expect you to come without invitation.”
This offended her. She would find out about it. But it continued to baffle her.
She stood high in school. She quickly learned how to dress and do her hair as well as the best of them. She read books, she shone in every school exhibition, but she continued a girl from the country. Evidently she must do more than come to them; she must bring them something. She’d see what college would do.
College did wonders for Patsy. She came to it full of health and zest, excellently prepared; good, oh very good, to look at; sufficiently supplied with money, and, greatest of all, determined to get everything going. “Nothing gets away from Patsy McCullon,” the envious sometimes said. It didn’t, nothing tried to: she was too useful, too agreeable, too resourceful. It didn’t matter whether it was a Greek or a tennis score, Patsy went after it, and oftener than not carried it away. Probably if there had been annual voting for the most popular girl in her class, there would never have been a year she wouldn’t have won. She had friends galore. All her short vacations she went on visits—the homes of distinguished people, it would have been noted, if anybody had been keeping tab on her. And Sabinsport always knew it.
“Miss Patsy McCullon, the daughter of Donald McCullon, is spending her Easter holiday in New York, with the daughter of Senator Blank,” the Argus reported. A thing like that didn’t get by the exclusive of Sabinsport. There weren’t many of them who would not have been willing to have given fat slices of their generous incomes for introduction into that fashionable household.