With it all I had left home in such a whirl of hurry and rage that I hadn’t had time really to realize myself until I sat in my seat and watched the train begin to wind around and around the foot-hills that lead up from the valley. And I must say that realization of myself was not much in the way of amusement. Why should I have left mother in a huff just because she is Aunt Grace’s obedient sister? Isn’t she also my browbeaten parent? And why rudely abandon the little nobleman, who was my guest, for trying to kiss my hand, which has been used for any old purpose, from digging worms for Dudley to fish with to supplying a surface to be pressed by Bobby Gentry’s adolescent bristles, even unto the mustache he at present flourishes? And others, too! No, I couldn’t honestly approve of myself, as hard as I tried. And, to make it worse, the very day itself was a balmy, pliant, feminine thing, with not a bluster in its disposition to harmonize with mine. There was a soft bridal veil of spring mist all over the Harpeth Valley, behind which the orchards were blushing pink and white, while by noon, as we began to go up the hills, I caught a whiff of that indescribable, lilting honeysuckle note that comes in the June rhapsody in the Alleghanies. You remember it, don’t you, deary, even if you do live in an enchanted Breton garden with a husband who sings? I’m going to remember it in heaven. No, I wasn’t very well pleased with myself, and I got more and more serious on the subject the higher the train crawled up toward the crown of Old Harpeth. If a naturally conscientious person has such a bad disposition that she finds it impossible to accept any form of criticism from other people, then she is ethically obliged to chastise her own self, which is the refinement of psychical cruelty. By three o’clock the only way I could drag myself out of the depths was by remembering how Aunt Grace’s nostrils distend while she insinuates to mother in my presence what an unsatisfactory daughter I am. I can always get up a rage with that mental picture. That is, I could; now it is different, because--but that is what I am going to tell you about. Of course I knew that Dudley’s letters all went to Crow Point, and the ticket-man had told me that we got there at five-fifty. That hour was not dark--quite, I knew, and I decided that I would have plenty of time to drive across the ridge to his camp at Pigeon Creek. Isn’t it a good thing for women that they can’t take peeps into what is going to happen to them next? Men could digest their disclosed futures complacently, but on account of pure excitement, women never in the world could even sufficiently masticate theirs to swallow them. “Is it far from Crow Point to Pigeon Creek?” I asked the conductor, by way of amusing myself. “About one horse-pull,” he answered lucidly, as he went to help a woman and eleven children off at Hitch It. I’m glad now he was no more explicit.