Now she went out of the library, and made her way to a favorite spot up on the hillside. It was a study hour, and she carried a book with her. The time she had spent here had wrought a transformation. The brain had unfolded and the heart had become unplaced. The terms of this school adapted themselves to the needs of the environment. They did not conflict with the nearer demands of farm work, but accommodated themselves to necessity. When the frequent vacations came, Minerva went back to the cabin which she called her home. Each of these visits she dreaded. Mountain reserve is hard to break. Even in her tempestuous appeal to the head of the school, she had not told her full story. Now she was thinking of it. Mountain women grow old while they are yet young, but her mother had seemed to her different. Mountain women are grave with a gravity which is more than half sullen, but she remembered a mother who had laughed and whose voice had been often raised in song. Then when she was still very small, she remembered one of those rude mountain funerals where those who come raise their voices in a weird incantation of "mourning," which they leave off for gossip as soon as the period set aside for the clamor comes to its end. After that she had been motherless and had kept house for a shiftless and surly father. That house-keeping had been simple enough in the shack of one room, but it had been unrelieved drudgery, and because she was one of those human beings who are less near of kinship to the members of the family with whom they live than with some far-off ancestor whose nature is strangely duplicated, Minerva had always had longings for things which were to her undefined dreams. Her nature had always been in insurrection against the squalid facts of her life. Her inclinations and thoughts struck back, by one of Nature's practical jokes, to some woman who had been a lady in the courtly life of Virginia a century, or maybe two centuries, ago, before her ancestors became stranded pioneers and lapsed into illiteracy, degeneracy and venal sloth here in the hard hills. What this all meant she had not known, but she knew that one memory alone was sweet to her thoughts, and that that was the memory of her mother. She knew, too, that even before they had taught her at the college how perverted it all was, this whole scheme of mountain feudalism and black ignorance and bitterness had seemed to her wrong and repugnant. Something had told her that somewhere there must be something different and that somehow she must find it and weave it into the pattern of her life. Of these things she had thought as she sat in the summer evenings on the slab bench before the cabin door. In summer there was a great pine, which, just after twilight had faded into velvet blackness in the sky, pointed an index upward beyond the valley; and over it, before the other stars came out there always appeared a tiny point of light, which she chose to call her star.