“Dinah, I wish you would get some jellies and nice things ready this morning and take them over to your Miss Dorothy for her sick people. You can use the carriage, but go as soon as you can get away; and give my love to your Miss Dorothy, and tell her I am not feeling well this morning. But tell her, Dinah, that I’ll drive over this afternoon about two o’clock and she must be ready to go with me for a drive. Poor child, she needs some relaxation!” Having thus secured immunity from Dinah’s kindly but at present unwelcome attentions, Edmonia Bannister proceeded, as she phrased it in her mind, to “take herself seriously in hand.” After long thought she formulated a program for herself. “My pride ought to have saved me from this humiliation,” she thought. “Having failed me in that, it must at least save me from the consequences of my misconduct. I’ll wear a cheerful face, whatever I may feel. I’ll cultivate whatever there is of jollity in me, and still better, whatever I possess of dignity. I’ll be social. I’ll entertain continually, as brother always wants me to do. I’ll have some of my girl friends with me every day and every night. I’ll busy myself with every duty I can find to do, and especially I shall devote myself to dear Dorothy. By the way, Arthur will expect a reply to his letter. I’ll begin my duty-doing with that.” And so she wrote: “You are by all odds the most ridiculous fellow, my dear Arthur, that I have yet encountered--the most preposterous, wrong headed, cantankerous (I hope that word is good English--and anyhow it is good Virginian, because it tells the truth) sort of human animal I ever yet knew. Do you challenge proof of my accusations? Think a bit and you’ll have it in abundance. Let me help you think by recounting your absurdities. “You were a young man, practically alone in the world, with no fortune except an annuity, which must cease at your death. You had no associates except scientific persons who never think of anything but trilobites and hydrocyanic acid and symptoms and all that sort of thing. Suddenly, and by reason of no virtuous activity of your own, you found yourself the owner of one of the finest estates in Virginia, and the head of one of its oldest and most honored houses. In brief you came into an inheritance for which any reasonable young man of your size and age would have been glad to mortgage his hopes of salvation and cut off the entail of all his desires. There, that’s badly quoted, I suppose, but it is from Shakespeare, I think, and I mean something by it--a thing not always true of a young woman’s phrases when she tries her hand at learned utterance.