Why don’t people realize that a seventeen-year-old girl’s heart is a sensitive wind-flower that may be shattered by a breath?  Mine shattered when Alfred went away to find something he could do to make a living, and Aunt Adeline gave the hard green stem to Mr. Carter when she married me to him.  Poor Mr. Carter!

No, I wasn’t twenty, and this town was full of women who were aunts and cousins and law-kin to me, and nobody did anything for me.  They all said with a sigh of relief, “It will be such a nice safe thing for you, Molly.”  And they really didn’t mean anything by tying up a gay, dancing, frolicking, prancing colt of a girl with a terribly ponderous bridle.  But God didn’t want to see me always trotting along slow and tired and not caring what happened to me, even pounds and pounds of plumpness, so he found use for Mr. Carter in some other place but this world, and I feel that He is going to see me through whatever happens.  If some of the women in my missionary society knew how friendly I feel with God they would put me out for contempt of court.

No, the town didn’t mean anything by chastening my spirit with Mr. Carter and they didn’t consider him in the matter at all, poor man.  Of that I feel sure.  Hillsboro is like that.  It settled itself here in a Tennessee valley a few hundreds of years ago and has been hatching and clucking over its own small affairs ever since.  All the houses set back from the street with their wings spread out over their gardens, and mothers here go on hovering even to the third and fourth generation.  Lots of times young, long-legged, frying-size boys scramble out of the nests and go off to college and decide to grow up where their crow will be heard by the world.  Alfred was one of them.

And, too, occasionally some man comes along from the big world and marries a plump little broiler and takes her away with him, but mostly they stay and go to hovering life on a corner of the family estate.  That’s what I did.

I was a poor, little, lost chick with frivolous tendencies and they all clucked me over into this empty Carter nest which they considered well-feathered for me.  It gave them all a sensation when they found out from the will just how well it was feathered.  And it gave me one, too.  All that money would make me nervous if Mr. Carter hadn’t made Doctor John its guardian, though I sometimes feel that the responsibility of me makes him treat me as if he were my step-grandfather-in-law.  But all in all, though stiff in its knees with aristocracy, Hillsboro is lovely and loving; and couldn’t inquisitiveness be called just real affection with a kind of squint in its eye?