"Yes, I rather dislike the thought of his growing into a great, rough, short-haired boy," Cousin Eunice a.s.sented, looking at him fondly.

"That terrible age when they always smell like their puppies! But, that's quite a while off. He is still a baby."

"I find that they are always more or less babies," mother said, looking toward me, "--no matter what their age may be."

"Oh, this talk about ages reminds me of a book I brought for Ann to read," Cousin Eunice said, rising from the table and starting toward the front hall where their bags had been hastily dropped that we might not delay Mammy Lou's hot breakfast. "Stay here, all of you, and wait until I get it. It contains an interesting thought."

"Then it's that much ahead of most new books," Rufe remarked, his attention having been attracted from his own line of talk by Cousin Eunice starting to leave the dining-room.

"It isn't strictly new," she commented, returning in a few moments with the book in her hand. "It was written several years ago. It's nothing out of the ordinary in plot, and the thought which impressed some of us in the 'Scribblers' Club' was concerning the age of Eve when she was created. The heroine of the story is named Eve and is young and fair, so the hero, a gallant soldier, remarks to her one day as they are walking by the river bank at a stolen tryst, that he fancies the first mother was at his sweetheart's identical age when she was created. You see, it is quite a poetic fancy."

"More poetic than true. Soldiers don't talk that way," father said drily. "How old did the book say this Eve was?"

"The author was too wise to tell in plain figures," she answered, "but it was somewhere under the twenties--in the early flush of youth."

"Well, Adam was the first man who ever had the chance of a wife made to order," father kept on. "Surely he had more sense than to take a seventeen-year-old girl."

"No, you're wrong," Rufe disagreed. "I believe that Adam was too much of a gentleman to look a gift wife in the mouth."

"I'll get the Concordance and see if there's any record of her age,"

mother said, bustling off toward her bedroom and returning in a moment with her well-worn book, but she was unable to find any definite facts about Eve on the morning of that first surgical operation.

"What difference does it make about the actual number of years?" Rufe inquired, with an air of dismissing the subject. "The age of Eve is that picturesque period which comes to a girl after her elbows are rounded out."

My bared arms happened to be resting again on the table during this discussion, and, as Rufe spoke, Cousin Eunice's eyes wandered in their direction. "Then Ann's at it," she concluded triumphantly, and they all stared at me curiously, as if the age of Eve were showing on me like pock-marks!

"Ann doesn't seem nearly so old as she really is," mother began with a kind of uneasy look. "You see, she has never been to school very much, so her education--"

"Now, please don't begin about my education," I begged, for it is a mooted question in my family whether or not I have any, father and I maintaining that I have all that is necessary, mother wishing that it had been more carefully directed along the conventional lines. "If I should go to school until I'm as old as Halley's comet I couldn't learn the things I don't like. And I know all the rest without going!

Don't people call me up for miles around to ask who wrote _Prometheus Bound_ and how to spell 'candidacy?'"

"So you're satisfied with yourself?" Rufe teased.

"Far from it," I denied, "but I am certainly satisfied with the amount of schooling _in schools_ I've had. Ugh, I hate the thought of it!"

"But how can you ever amount to anything without an education?" mother persisted.

"Never fear," I a.s.sured her easily. "I'll amount to my destiny, no matter whether I've ever seen inside a school or not. When I was a child I always imagined I was cut out to be Somebody; and even now I occasionally have a notion that Fate is watching me through her lorgnette!"

"You and Jean Everett used to have such queer ideas about yourselves--with your notions of marrying dukes and living in castles, and all that kind of thing," Cousin Eunice said, after a moment of amused thought.

"Jean still has her notions," Rufe broke in. "Our city editor is out of his depth in love with her and I met her on the street the other day and tried to bespeak her pity for the poor fellow. She a.s.sured me that the man _she_ married would be so important the papers would all get out an extra every time his a.s.sa.s.sination was attempted!"

"Well, she'd better decide to take Guilford then," I said warmly, for it is a source of great satisfaction to me that my old friend, Jean (still my best friend), is half-engaged to Guilford Houghton, a grave young lawyer who is already making people take notice. He is a very quiet, dignified young man, so tall and thin and straight that he reminds me of a silk umbrella carefully rolled.

For a long time Jean seemed not to care much about him, but he kept paying his court as persistently as a fly in wet weather until she was finally won--half-way. He has very methodical ways, and calls to see her only on Sunday and Wednesday evenings, but she devotes so much time and care to her toilet for hours and hours preceding these visits that we call them her "days of purification."

"Guilford is not so showy, maybe," she said to me one time, in explanation of her fondness for him, which she tries hard to conceal, "but he's so _dependable_. That's worth a lot to a girl who has been engaged to four or five Apollos, all of them about as reliable as drop-st.i.tch stockings!"

"For my part, I admire Jean's ambition," father spoke up, although none of us suspected that he was listening to our rambling talk. "I'd rather see a girl with an ambition like that than one with none at all--one of these little empty-headed gigglers whose age of Eve announces its arrival by all the i's in her name being changed into y's."

Waterloo came in at this point and demanded again that the mules be shown him, so father and Rufe set out for the stables.

"Shall we walk around and look at things, too?" I asked Cousin Eunice as we filed out on to the back porch. It is a habit with us two to steal away for a quiet little talk the first few hours we are together and take stock of each other's happenings since we met last.

"No," she answered, looking at me steadily. "The orchard and vineyard are more beautiful in the afternoon. We'll walk all over the place then. Besides, I have a notion that you'll want to tell me things which will sound better in the afternoon sunshine."

"Not a thing," I denied, and wondered how a discussion of poetic fancies at the breakfast table could make her so sentimental.

"Then you are wasting some mighty valuable time," she replied. "Most normal girls of your age are brimful of plans and ideas." She would have said secrets, as she intended to, but Mammy Lou hove in sight just then with a big pan of b.u.t.ter-beans for me to sh.e.l.l for dinner.

Rufe had stopped her at the kitchen door with the usual query, "Well, Mammy, you're not married again?"

"Naw, sir," she had admitted, with a self-conscious smile, "although I did have a _boa'der_ all the spring."

Waterloo protested against even this slight pause in their progress toward the stables, so with an amused smile Rufe forbore to continue the conversation, but pa.s.sed on and Mammy Lou ambled in our direction just in time to hear part of Cousin Eunice's remark to me.

"Law, Miss Eunice, you can't git nothin' out o' _her_," she said disgustedly, as she set the pan of beans down and began to fan herself with her ap.r.o.n. "She's plen'y old enough, the Lord knows, to be takin'

notice, _although_ Mis' Mary don't think so. I heerd you-all talkin'

'bout certain ages at the breakfas' table, but I can tell you _she_ ain't at it. She don't look at nary one of 'em twicet; an' when the sh.o.r.e-nuff age of Eve has come to a girl she begins eyin' ever' man she meets to see if he's got a missin' rib that'll match with hern!"

CHAPTER III

THE BOOKWORM TURNS

"'Tis ill work trying to ride Pegasus on a side-saddle," Cousin Eunice said this morning as she hurriedly threw aside her pencil and paper and ran to tell Dilsey about not putting any starch in the legs of Waterloo's rompers. "He's not a lady's horse anyhow," she continued as she came back and sat down on the gra.s.s again, "especially after a man, a baby and a gas stove have come into the lady's life."

"Gas stove?" I questioned, looking up from my book, a heavy old French book, it was, for mother's remark about my neglected education had made me feel a little uneasy after all. Cousin Eunice is not the kind of woman to fill her letters full of household matters, hence my surprised question.

"A good cook, with me, is only a memory," she said with a sadly reminiscent air. "I have a girl whose name is Pearl, but alas it is a lie! Even the day I learned that my book had found a publisher I had to get up out of my trance and peel potatoes for luncheon."

"Surely not!"

"Yes. I peeled them, but they were never cooked, for when Rufe came home and heard the news he hustled us all off to town and we had luncheon in Beauregard's privatest dining-room. We ordered all the things that disagree with us most--by way of reckless indulgence."

"How did you feel when you heard that news?" I asked with interest, for the book ma.n.u.script which Cousin Eunice had been working on since the days of her single blessedness had grown to be like a member of the family with us all, especially of late years, after a certain critic had p.r.o.nounced it good. It suddenly grew so valuable after that that she kept it in a little brown leather bag all the time and would never leave the house without telling somebody where that bag was (in case of fire) and making them promise to play Casabianca to those precious sheets until they should be rescued.

"Just dazed!" she answered simply. "Pretty much as I felt when I found that Rufe was going to be mine--only a great deal less so, you know."

"I wonder if you are ever going to be really great?" I pursued, for since I have grown so old I share all her hopes and fears, just as if we were sisters. "With a trip around the world as a starter, and a quiet little castle on the Italian coast as a next step. Then you can sign checks for a thousand dollars and get your pictures taken for nothing."

"Well, not at the rate I'm going now," she replied with a rueful smile toward her book and pencil lying inert on the gra.s.s; yet she made no effort to resume her work. Evidently the starch in Waterloo's rompers had driven away romance.

"But everything has its compensation," she continued after a moment.

"If I never get my great trip around the world with a ten-days'