Page:Henry B. Fuller - Bertram Cope's Year, 1919.djvu/315

 the brilliancy of the younger. Her own people, if they appeared in Churchton, might seem a bit simple and provincial too.

Hortense took Carolyn's slight and fond observations with a silent scorn. When she spoke at all, she was likely to say something about "family"; and it was gathered that the dashing correspondent at Nashville was conspicuously "well-connected." Also, that he belonged to the stirring New South and had put money in his purse. Hortense's contempt for the semi-rustic and impecunious Cope became boundless.

About the middle of July a letter lay on the front-hall table for Carolyn. It was from Cope.

"Only think!" said Carolyn to herself, in a small private ecstasy within her locked bedchamber; "he wrote on his own account and of his own accord. Not a line from me; not a suggestion!"

The letter was an affair of two small pages. "Yours very sincerely, Bertram L. Cope" simply told "My dear Miss Thorpe" that he had been spending three or four days in Winnebago, Wisconsin, and that he had now returned home for a month of further study, having obtained a post in an important university in the East, at a satisfactory stipend. A supplementary line conveyed regards to Mrs. Phillips. And that was all.

Was it a handful of husks, or was it a banquet? Carolyn took it for the latter and lived on it for days. Little it mattered what or how much he had written: he had written, and of his own accord—as