There is a certain kind of woman whose brain develops with amazing normality and strength, but whose heart remains very soft-fibered and uncertain, with tendencies to lapse into second childhood.  I am that garden variety, and it took the exercising of many heart interests to toughen my cardiac organ.

As I traveled out the long turnpike that wound itself through the Harpeth Valley to the very old and tradition-mossed town of Riverfield, in the high, huge-wheeled, swinging old coach of my Great-grandmother Craddock, sitting pensively alone while father occupied the front seat beside Uncle Cradd, both of them in deep converse about a line in Tom Moore, while Uncle Cradd bumbled the air of “Drink to me only with thine eyes” in a lovely old bass, I should have been softly and pensively weeping at the thought of the devastation of my father’s fortune, of the poverty brought down upon his old age, and about my fate as a gay social being going thus into exile; but I wasn’t.  Did I say that I was sitting alone in state upon the faded rose leather of those ancestral cushions?  That was not the case, for upon the seat beside me rode the Golden Bird in a beautiful crate, which bore the legend, “Cock, full brother to Ladye Rosecomb, the world’s champion, three-hundred-and-fourteen-egg hen, insured at one thousand dollars.  Express sixteen dollars.”  And in another larger crate, strapped on top of the old haircloth trunk, which held several corduroy skirts, some coarse linen smocks made hurriedly by Madam Felicia after a pattern in “The Review,” and several pairs of lovely, high-topped boots, as well as a couple of Hagensack sweaters, rode his family, to whom he had not yet even spoken.  The family consisted of ten perfectly beautiful white Leghorn feminine darlings whose crate was marked, “Thoroughbreds from Prairie Dog Farm, Boulder, Colorado.”  I had obtained the money to purchase these very much alive foundations for my fortune, also the smart farmer’s costume, or rather my idea of the correct thing in rustics, by selling all the lovely lingerie I had brought from Paris with me just the week before the terrible war had crashed down upon the world, and which I had not worn because I had not needed them, to Bess Rutherford and Belle Proctor at very high prices, because who could tell whether France would ever procure their like again?  They were composed mostly of incrustations of embroidery and real Val, and anyway the Golden Bird only cost seven hundred dollars instead of the thousand, and the ladies Bird only ten dollars apiece, which to me did not seem exactly fair, as they were of just as good family as he.  I was very proud of myself for having been professional enough to follow the directions of my new big red book on “The Industrious Fowl,” and to buy Golden Bird and his family from localities which were separated as far as is the East from the West.  My company was responsible for my light-heartedness at a time when I should have been weeping with vain regrets