can’t cure her of it, do what I will.”
“Why should you try?” asked Arthur, almost with excitement in his tone. “Why should you try to spoil nature’s fine handiwork? That child’s intellectual attitude is the very best I ever saw in one so young, so simple and so childlike. For heaven’s sake, let her alone! Let her live her own life and think in her own honest, candid and fearless way, and she will develop into a womanhood as noble as any that the world has seen since Eve persuaded Adam to eat of the tree of knowledge and quit being a fool.”
“Arthur, you shock me!”
“I’m sorry, Aunt Polly, but I shall shock you far worse than that, if you persist in your effort to warp and pervert that child’s nature to fit it to some preconceived purpose of conventionality.”{75}
{75}
“I don’t know just what you mean, Arthur,” responded the old lady, “but I know my duty, and I’m going to do it. The one thing necessary in Dorothy’s case, is to stop her from thinking, and train her to settle down, when the time comes, into the life of a Virginia matron. It is her only salvation.”
“Salvation from what?” asked Arthur, almost angrily.
“I can’t tell you,” the old lady answered. “But the girl will never settle into her proper place if she goes on thinking, as she does now. So I’m going to stop it.”
“And I,” the young man thought, though he did not say it, “am going to teach her to think more than ever. I’ll educate that child so long as I am condemned to lead this idle life. I’ll make it my business to see that her mind shall not be put into a corset, that her extraordinary truthfulness shall not be taught to tell lies by indirection, that she shall not be restrained of her natural and healthful development. It will be worth while to play the part of idle plantation owner for a year or two, to accomplish a task like that. I can never learn to feel any profound interest in the growing of tobacco, wheat and corn—but the cultivation of that child into what she should be is a nobler work{76} than that of all the agriculturists of the south side put together. I’ll make it my task while I am kept here away from my life’s chosen work.”
{76}
That day Arthur Brent sent a letter to New York. In it he ordered his library and the contents of his laboratory sent to him at Wyanoke. He ordered also a good many books that were
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