I had hoped to get a few minutes Sunday afternoon to myself so I could go up into the garret and look through one of the trunks I brought from Paris with me to see how many sets of things I have got left. I am going to need a trousseau pretty soon, and I might need it more suddenly than I expect. I don't see any reason for people's not marrying immediately when they make up their minds, and my half of ours is made up strong enough to decidedly influence rapidity in his. But then I really don't believe that the Crag would care very much about the high lights of a trousseau, and it was just as well that Nell came in to get me to help her write a letter to National Headquarters to know if she could have any kind of assignment in the Campaign for the Convention to alter the Constitution in Tennessee when it meets next winter.
"Have you made up your mind fully to go in for public life, Nell?" I asked mildly. "Some of your friends might not like it very much and—and—"
"If you mean Polk Hayes, Evelina," Nell answered with the positiveness that only a very young person can get up the courage to use, "I have forgot that I was ever influenced by his narrow-minded, primitive personality at all. If I ever love and marry it will be a man who can appreciate and further my real woman's destiny."
"Well, then, that's all right," I answered with such relief in my heart that it must have showed in my voice and face. I had worried about Nell since I could see plainly, though she hasn't told me yet, and I am sure he doesn't realize it, that Jane had decided Folk's destiny. Nell is not twenty-one yet and she will find lots of men in the world that will be fully capable of making her believe they feel that way about her destiny, until they succeed in tying her up to using it for the real utilitarian purposes they are sure such a pretty woman is created for.
It will take men in general another hundred years yet, and lots of suffering, to realize that a woman's destiny is anything but himself, and get to housekeeping with her on that basis.
Of course, I see the justice and need of perfect equality in all things between the sexes, emotional equality especially, but I hope the time will never come when men get as hungry to see their women folks as said feminists get to see them, after they have been away about four days out in the Harpeth Valley. It takes a woman's patience to stand the tug.
The Crag didn't jog into Glendale on his raw-boned old horse until one-thirty Monday night. I had been watching down Providence Road for him from my pillow ever since I put out my light at eleven, because Jane had decided that it was our duty to go to bed early so as to be as fresh as possible for the rally in the morning. She had walked to the gate with Polk at ten and hadn't come back until eleven, so, of course, she was ready to turn in. It was just foolish, primitive old convention that kept me from slipping on my slippers and dressing-gown—I've got the prettiest ones that ever came across the Atlantic, Louise de Mereton, Rue de Rivoli, Paris—and going down to the gate to see him for just a minute. That second he stood undecided in the middle of the road looking at my darkened house was agony that I'm not going to put up with very much longer.
Scientifically I feel that I'm thinking life with one lobe of my brain and breathing with one lung. Still I made myself go to sleep.
Everybody believes in God in a different kind of way, and mine satisfies me entirely. I know that the hairs of my head are numbered and that not a sparrow falls; and I don't stop at that. I feel sure that my tears are measured and my smiles are rejoiced over, and when I want a good day to come to me I ask for it and mostly get it. There never was another like the one He sent me down this morning on the first slim ray of dawn that slid over the side of Old Harpeth!
The sun was warm and jolly and hospitable from the arrival of its first rays, but the wind was deliciously cool and bracing and full of the wine of October. It came racing across the fields laden with harvest scents, blustering a bit now and then enough to bring down a shower of nuts or to make the yellow corn in the shocks in the fields rustle ominously of a winter soon to come.