Argument was of no avail. When I avouched my preference for the country she said quietly that I knew nothing of the city yet, and that every one should try more than one side of life before making a final choice. She was very gentle, but Great-aunt Virginia herself could not have been more inflexible. We went, to the envy of my cousin, Billy Wrenn, and to my own silent and passionate grief. As I grew older, Aunt Letitia grew younger—younger, that is, in her ideas and in her desires for me. She cared far more than I about my clothes, and took a livelier interest in possible lovers. I understood, beneath this late blossoming of pleasure in what she called gay life, the starved aspirations of her own youth, shut away in the seclusion of her beautiful home during the many years of her widowed mother’s invalidism and morbid grieving for her husband. There were times when her dead-and-gone girlhood rose to life in her eyes, and a soft color tinged her delicate cheeks, as she imagined for me some small social triumph or admired me in some new dress. I divined that she was immensely interested in my men friends, though her shyness in discussing them was even greater than her interest. I wondered often if she had a love-story of her own; but I never knew. My own love-story, when it came, gave her great happiness; and for three years after my marriage she lived with us in great content, and passed out at last in utter peace. My husband is known in our family circle as the Peon, since he entered into a contract to work for me without wages for life. He brought into our home at our marriage his brother’s orphaned child, David Bird, a little fellow four years of age, who flatly refused to call me auntie and dubbed me Mammy Lil. That was many years ago; and as the time has passed the Peon and I have realized with deepening gratitude our debt to the little child who has given our home its crowning joy. But for David we would have been childless, growing old alone; for we owe Caro to David, too. I have never flattered myself that we could have captured and held the heart of that tricksey birdling if David had not added to our attractions childhood’s lure to a child.