He led her out to the track, put her on the car, and followed. "How'd you know?" he asked as he sat down by her. "Cousin Robert told me he wouldn't mention it to any of you at the house till matters were decided."
"He ought to have told it at home from the start," she cried, and explained how she knew and they talked it and the situation at home over in their sorry details. Then she burst forth again, the more passionately that being here on the street-car, it must be restrainedly.
"Look at me, Culpepper? What am I? What am I fit for? What am I able to do as anything should be done? I've been given no way at all to earn my living. I've never been allowed to order a meal, or go to market to fit me even that way. I've never drawn a check, and I've never paid a bill. I'm past nineteen and at as pitiful a beginning as I was at sixteen."
She swallowed, looking ahead, her eyes fixed absently on the only other passenger in the car at the moment. Her profile thus was to Culpepper and he loved it. Fair and clear-cut and fine, he had loved it in her when she was a child.
She was seeing not the other passenger at all at whom she gazed so bitterly, poor man, but a grievance because of which she was passionately rebellious.
"You were made ready from the start, Culpepper; everybody concerned saw to it _you_ were prepared. I'm hard about it. I'm resentful. I accuse--who or what is it I _do_ accuse?" piteously. "Mamma? Papa? Conditions? The system? If there is any system for bringing up girls, and it isn't _all_ just haphazard! And Culpepper, at home they're all so helpless! Mamma and Auntie! And Papa's so sensitive and is going to grow pitiful under this second failure and the having to take, as I suppose he will, some little clerkship, somebody'll be charitable enough to give him. It's up to me. And I want it to be up to me. You must see that the whole measure of what I'll ever be depends on my seeing right now that it _is_ up to me. And, Oh, what way is there for me to meet it?"
He laid a hand on her arm and nodded abruptly toward the window. She followed his indicating nod and looked out. The car had turned into a residence street, and they were passing the house where Tuttle Jones made his home with his exceedingly well-to-do parents. Pompous and broad, and of comely stone was this home in its wide yard, its flower vases overflowing with bloom and color. But it was to something more pertinent than the Jones' house Culpepper with his nod referred.