“Good-by, Mr. Flint!  I’ll never see a butterfly or a moth, the whole time I’m gone, without making believe he’s a messenger from Madame, and the Padre, and you, and Kerry.  I’ll play he’s a carrier-butterfly, with a message tucked away under his wings:  ’Howdy, Mary Virginia!  I’ve just come from flying over the flowers in the Parish House garden; and the folks are all well, and busy, and happy.  But they haven’t forgotten you for a single solitary minute, and they miss you and wish you’d come back; and they send you their dear, dear love—­and I’ll carry your dear, dear love back to them!’ So if you see a big, big, beautiful, strange fellow come sailing by your window some morning, why, that’s mine, Mr. Flint!  Remember!”

And then she was gone, and he had his first taste of unselfish human sorrow.  Heretofore his worries had been purely personal and self-centered:  this was different, and innocent.  It shocked and terrified him to find out how intensely he could miss another being, and that being a mere child.  He wasn’t used to that sort of pain, and it bewildered him.

Eustis himself had wanted the little girl sent to a preparatory school which would fit her for one of the women’s colleges.  He had visions of the forward sweep of women—­visions which his wife didn’t share.  Her daughter should go to the Church School at which she herself had been educated, an exclusive and expensive institution where the daughters of the wealthy were given a finishing hand-polish with ecclesiastical emery, as a sort of social hall-mark.  Mrs. Eustis had a horror of what she called, in quotation-marks, the modern non-religious method of educating young ladies.

The Eustis house was closed, and left in charge of the negro caretakers, for Mrs. Eustis couldn’t stand the loneliness of the place after the child’s departure, and Eustis himself found his presence more and more necessary at the great plantation he was building up.  Mrs. Eustis left Appleboro, and my mother missed her.  There was a vein of pure gold underlying the placid little woman’s character, which the stronger woman divined and built upon.

Laurence, too, entered college that Fall.  I had coached him, in such hours as I could spare.  He was conscientious enough, though his Greek was not the Greek of Homer and he vexed the soul of my mother with a French she said was spoke

    full fair and fetisly
    After ye schole of Strattford atte Bowe.

But if he hadn’t Mary Virginia’s sensitiveness to all beauty, nor her playful fancy and vivid imagination, he was clear-brained and clean-thinking, with that large perspective and that practical optimism which seem to me so essentially American.  He saw without confusion both the thing as it was and as it could become.  With only enough humor to save him, he had a sternness more of the puritan than of the cavalier blood from which he had sprung.  Above all was he informed with that new spirit brooding upon the face of all the waters, a spirit that for want of a better name one might call the Race Conscience.