When her husband died, Grace was left sole mistress of his estate—which included, according to our beautiful state law, the plantation she inherited from her father. But her brother calmly assumed the management of everything. Cousin Jason is really a Mohammedan born out of due place. He cannot conceive of a woman’s having mind or soul of her own, much less rights; and he proposes, in all honesty, to do his next-of-kin duty by the widowed family fool. Grace, I suppose, was too broken by grief to realize what she was doing; but in any event she would probably have given way to him; she spent her girlhood, as she now spends her widowhood, trying to keep her half-brother in a good humor. She yielded to him absolutely, even to giving him power of attorney over all her belongings, and to vacating her own pretty rose-colored bed-room, with its private bath, on the first floor of her home. Cousin Jay never liked to sleep upstairs; it was too far from his work, he said. He has certainly, the Peon says, made everything pay well; he has Cousin Chad’s own genius for money-making. But he does not believe in spending money, nor, of course, in giving it; nor in being bothered with “idle gossiping women who ought to be at home minding their husbands’ affairs.” (He is never conscious of a woman except as the appendage of some man.) So Grace controls neither her own money nor her own home. All her gracious hospitality, her wise open-handedness to those in need, is a thing of the past. It is difficult for Milly even to have ordinary visitors, except in the afternoons; and if it were not for the child’s other-worldly beauty, before which the judgments applied to most girls are abashed, one would almost call her dresses shabby. But it is not easy to think of her dress, the girl herself so charms one. She has been telling me a little of her troubles, poor child; they have been hard to manage in her mother’s absence. Chief among them, as I infer, mainly from what she did not say, is the difficulty of being properly courteous to Robert Lincoln, without calling down Cousin Jason’s boorish wrath on the young man’s head, as well as her own.