It had grown in my mind as I spoke, that I had been of age now more than a year and nothing had come of it. The suggestion that my father could have taken a less active interest in the event on my behalf, pressed upon a dying sensibility; I resented his being so committed to this posthumous slight and meant to defend him from it. "He'd have wanted me to have mine on my birthday, the same as Forester," I insisted. "Oh, Olivia!" My mother's tone intimated annoyance at my claim to being supported by my father in my absurdities, but her good humour was proof against it. "Girls have theirs when they are married," she soothed. I held up the platter and whisked the stiff froth with the air of doing these things very dexterously; I wasn't going to admit by taking it seriously, that my brother's coming of age was any more important than mine, but I spare you the flippancies by which I covered the hurt of realizing that to everybody except myself, it was. "It is so like you, Olivia," said my mother, with tears in her eyes, "to want to spoil everything." What I had really spoiled was the free exercise of partiality by which she was enabled to distinguish Forester over her other children, according to her sense of his deserts; and, besides, what in the world would the child do with all that money? "The same thing that Forester does," I maintained, and then quickly to forestall another objection which I saw rising in her face. "If you were old enough to be married at nineteen, I guess I am old enough to be trusted with a few hundred dollars." But there I had struck again on the structure of tradition that kept Taylorville from direct contact with the issues of life; anybody was old enough to be married at eighteen, but money was a serious matter. Whenever I said things like that I could see my mother waver between a shocked wonder at having produced such unnaturalness, and the fear that somebody might overhear us. And I didn't know myself what I wanted with that money, except that I craved the sense of being important that went with the possession of it. And of course now that I had been refused it on the ground of sex, it was part of the general resistance that I opposed to things as they were, to have it on principle. Just when I had mother almost convinced that she ought to give it to me, she made it nearly impossible for me to accept, by asking Forester what she ought to do about it. When I had demanded it as the evidence of my taking rank with my brother as a personage, it was insufferable that it should come to me as a concession of his amiability. What I really wanted of course was to have it put under my plate with an affectionate speech about its being the legacy of a soldier and the witness of his integrity, coupled with the hope that I would spend it in a manner to give pleasure to my dear father, who was no doubt looking on at this happy incident.