“There now, Aun’ Jinkey, don’t you see?  Uncle owns you, yet you think for yourself and have a religion of your own.  If he knew I was thinking for myself, he’d invoke the memory of all the Barons against me.  I don’t know very much about the former Barons, except that my father was one.  According to what I am told, the girl Barons were the primmest creatures I ever heard of.  Then uncle and aunt are so inconsistent, holding up as they do for my admiration Cousin Mad Whately.  I don’t wonder people shorten his name from Madison to Mad, for if ever there was a wild, reckless fellow, he is.  Uncle wants to bring about a match, because Mad’s plantation joins ours.  Mad acted as if he owned me already when he was home last, and yet he knows I can’t abide him.  He seems to think I can be subdued like one of his skittish horses.”

“You hab got a heap on yo’ min”, Miss Lou, you sho’ly hab.  You sut’ny t’ink too much for a young gyurl.”

“I’m eighteen, yet uncle and aunt act toward me in some ways as if I were still ten years old.  How can I help thinking?  The thoughts come.  You’re a great one to talk against thinking.  Uncle says you don’t do much else, and that your thoughts are just like the smoke of your pipe.”

Aun’ Jinkey bridled indignantly at first, but, recollecting herself, said quietly:  “I knows my juty ter ole mars’r en’ll say not’n gin ’im.  He bring you up en gib you a home, Miss Lou.  You must reckermember dat ar.”

“I’m in a bad mood, I suppose, but I can’t help my thoughts, and it’s kind of a comfort to speak them out.  If he only would give me a home and not make it so much like a prison!  Uncle’s honest, though, to the backbone.  On my eighteenth birthday he took me into his office and formally told me about my affairs.  I own that part of the plantation on the far side of the run.  He has kept all the accounts of that part separate, and if it hadn’t been for the war I’d have been rich, and he says I will be rich when the war is over and the South free.  He said he had allowed so much for my bringing up and for my education, and that the rest was invested, with his own money, in Confederate bonds.  That is all right, and I respect uncle for his downright integrity, but he wants to manage me just as he does my plantation.  He wishes to produce just such crops of thoughts as he sows the seeds of, and he would treat my other thoughts like weeds, which must be hoed out, cut down and burned.  Then you see he hasn’t given me a home, and I’m growing to be a woman.  If I am old enough to own land, am I never to be old enough to own myself?”

“Dar now, Miss Lou, you raisin’ mo’ questions dan I kin tink out in a yeah.”