Mrs. Gano soon discovered that her own view of her exile among a ruder people, and to a narrower and more primitive life, was not likely to be shared by her neighbors, proud of their New England origin, and secure in their honest self-esteem. This difference of view was a matter quite unimportant to the new-comer, except that it made it easier to carry out her plan of refraining from any share in the active life of the bustling little community. "I am an invalid," she gave out; "I neither pay nor receive visits." She did not even go often to church. The Rev. Mr. Collins was "a person of no education," she decided, "and spoke with a vile Western accent." But she rented a pew, and with rigid regularity sent the children to sit in it. Her children! As she called them, so she treated them--John, six feet two, doing a man's work in the world, with a man's spirit, and the tall, grave Valeria. The girl was an enigmatic creature, silent, self-absorbed, shrinking from the give-and-take of social life. It was not the cross to her that it was to her more genial brother that their mother's craving for solitude, and not too Christian contempt for her well-meaning neighbors, precluded asking people to the house. But the young man, after the young man's fashion, escaped to some extent the tyranny of home conditions. He had come forth from his juvenile predilection for pious observances. He had developed a passion for natural science, and yet was content to work hard all day in the bank, and to spend his free evenings in a rapidly acquired circle of new friends. In summer there were moonlight drives and walks; there was boating on the Mioto, and singing songs and discreet love-making on the "stoops" of the houses of the prettiest girls. In the mild weather, too, sometimes combining a picnic with the pursuit of knowledge, he would make up a party to go to Black Hand or Cedar Rock, where the hills were rich in fossils, and sometimes he would go farther afield to find specimens in the coal seams of the region. In winter there were church sociables, "taffy-pulls," sleigh-rides, and skating-parties. He was, in short, living an active and healthy life under conditions not intrinsically inspiring, perhaps, except to the inner vision of ardent youth. His mother offered no objection to his amusing himself in New Plymouth's somewhat crude society, but took quick alarm at a piece of chance gossip repeated by the privileged factotum, Aunt Jerusha. "Massa John done got a reel truly-truly sweetheart _dis_ time. He'll be marryin' her berry soon, by all 'counts."