“My, yes,” she answered, tossing up a heap of missives from the depths of her trunk.  “It was from the same one that wrote me these.  I’ve been going with him three years.  I met him up in the grape country where I went to pick grapes.  They give you your board and you can make twenty-seven or thirty dollars in a fall.  He made up his mind as soon as he saw me that I was about right.  Now he wants me to marry him.  That’s what his letter said to-night.  He is making three dollars a day and he owns a farm and a horse and wagon.  He bought his sister a $300 piano this fall.”

“Well, of course,” I said eagerly, “you will accept him?”

She looked half shy, half pleased, half surprised.

“No, my! no,” she answered, shaking her head.  “I don’t want to be married.”

“But why not?  Don’t you think you are foolish?  It’s a good chance and you have already been ‘going with him’ three years.”

“Yes, I know that, but I ain’t ready to marry him yet.  Twenty-five is time enough.  I’m only twenty-three.  I can have a good time just as I am.  He didn’t want me to come away and neither did my parents.  I thought it would ’most kill my father.  He looked like he’d been sick the day I left, but he let me come ’cause he knew I’d never be satisfied until I got my independence.”

What part did the love of humanity play in this young egoist’s heart?  She was living, as she had so well explained it, “not to save, but to give herself pleasure”; not to spare others, but to exercise her will in spite of them.  Tenderness, reverence, gratitude, protection are the feelings which one generation awakens for another.  Among the thousand contemporaries at Perry, from the sameness of their ambitions, there was inevitable rivalry and selfishness.  The closer the age and capacity the keener the struggle.

[Illustration:  AFTER SATURDAY NIGHT’S SHOPPING]

There are seven churches in Perry of seven different denominations.  In this small town of 3,000 inhabitants there are seven different forms of worship.  The church plays an important part in the social life of the mill hands.  There are gatherings of all sorts from one Sunday to another, and on Sunday there are almost continuous services.  There are frequent conversions.  When the Presbyterian form fails they “try” the Baptist.  There is no moral instruction; it is all purely religious; and they join one church or another more as they would a social club than an ordained religious organization.

Friday was “social” night at the church.  Sometimes there was a “poverty” social, when every one put on shabby clothes, and any one who wore a correct garment of any sort was fined for the benefit of the church.  Pound socials were another variety of diversion, where all the attendants were weighed on arriving and charged a cent admission for every pound of avoirdupois.