" 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 Carolyn made a point of
from the first. There is an algebraic formula expressive of the truth that
"1" is an infinitely greater number of times than "0.
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