bartered forty precious years of wifehood and motherhood to learn
it.

During the years of my childhood and girlhood, our family passed
from wealth to poverty. My father and only brother were killed in
battle during the Civil War; our slaves were freed; our plantations
melted from my mother's white hands during the Reconstruction days;
our big town house was sold for taxes.

When I married, my only dowry was a fierce pride and an overwhelming
ambition to get back our material prosperity. My husband was making
a "good living." He was kind, easy-going, with a rare capacity for
enjoying life and he loved his wife with that chivalrous,
unquestioning, "the queen-can-do-no-wrong" type of love.

But even in our days of courting I answered his ardent love-making
with, "And we will work and save and buy back the big house; then we
will--" etc., etc.

And he? Ah, alone at sixty, I can still hear echoing down the years
his big tender laugh, as he'd say, "Oh, what a de-ah, ambitious
little sweetheart I have!"

He owned a home, a little cottage with a rose garden at one side of
it--surely, with love, enough for any bride. But I--I saw only the
ancestral mansion up the street, the big old house that had passed
out of the hands of our family.

I would have no honeymoon trip; I wanted the money instead. John
kissed each of my palms before he put the money into them. My