Of course for years, as all women have been doing who are sensible enough to use the brains God gave them and stop depending on their centuries-seasoned intuitions and fascinations, I have been reading about this feminist revolution that seems all of a sudden to have revoluted from nobody knows where, and I have been generally indignant over things whether I understood them or not, and I have felt that I was being oppressed by the opposite sex, even if I could not locate the exact spot of the pain produced.  I have always felt that when I got to it I would shake off the shackles of my queer fondness and of my dependence upon my oppressors, and do something revengeful to them.

When my father died in my Junior year and left me all alone in the world, the first thing that made me feel life in my veins again was the unholy rage I experienced when I found that he had left me bodaciously and otherwise to my fifth cousin, James Hardin.

Cousin James is a healthy reversion to the primitive type of Father Abraham, and he has so much aristocratic moss on him that he reminds me of that old gray crag that hangs over Silver Creek out on Providence Road.  Artistically he is perfectly beautiful in an Old-Testament fashion.  He lives in an ancient, rambling house across the road from my home, and he is making a souvenir collection of derelict women.  Everybody that dies in Glendale leaves him a relict, and including his mother, Cousin Martha, he now has either seven or nine female charges, depending on the sex of Sallie Carruthers’s twin babies, which I can’t exactly remember, but will wager is feminine.

My being left to him was an insult to me, though of course Father did not see it that way.  He adored the Crag, as everybody else in Glendale does, and wouldn’t have considered not leaving him precious me.  Wanting to ignore Cousin James, because I was bound out to him until my twenty-fifth year or marriage, which is worse, has kept me from Glendale all these four years since father died suddenly while I was away at college, laid up with the ankle which I broke in the gymnasium.  Still, as much as I resent him, I keep the letter the Crag wrote me the night after Father died, right where I can put my hand on it if life suddenly panics me for any reason.  It covers all the circumstances I have yet met.  I wonder if I ought to burn it now!

But, to be honest with myself, I will have to confess that the explosively sentimental scene on the front porch, the night I left for college, with Polk Hayes has had something to do with my cowardice in lingering in foreign climes.  I feel that it is something I will have to go on with some day, and the devil will have to pick up the chips.  Polk is the kind of man that ought to be exterminated by the government in sympathy for its women wards, if his clan didn’t make such good citizens when they do finally marry.  He ought at least to be labeled “poison for the very young.”  I was very young out on the porch that night.  Still, I don’t resent him like I do the archaic Crag.