Patience read this letter with some alarm. All that she had heard and read of the stage made her apprehensive. She feared that Rosita would become fast, would drink and smoke, and not maintain a proper reserve with men. Then the natural independence of her character asserted itself, and she felt pride in Rosita’s courage and promptness of action. She even envied her a little: her life would be so full of variety.

“And after all it’s fate,” she thought philosophically. “She was cut out for the stage if ever a girl was. You might as well try to keep a bird from using its wings, or Miss Beale and auntie from being Temperance. I wonder what my fate is. It’s not the stage, but it’s not this, neither—not much. Shouldn’t wonder if I made a break for Mr. Field some day. But I couldn’t leave auntie. She’s the kind that gets a hold on you.”

She did her duty by Hog Heights during Miss Tremont’s brief holiday, but did it as concisely as was practicable. She found it impossible to sympathise with people that were content to let others support them, giving nothing in return. Her strong independent nature despised voluntary weakness. It was her private opinion that these useless creatures with only the animal instinct to live, and not an ounce of grey matter in their skulls, encumbered the earth, and should be quietly chloroformed.

Despite her love for Miss Tremont, she breathed more freely in her absence. She was surfeited with religion, and at times possessed with a very flood of revolt and the desire to let it loose upon every church worker in Mariaville. But affection and gratitude restrained her.