Jane, with the prickly sweetness of suffering virtue.

"But she's a young girl--young girls oughtn't to hear such things,"
argued Uncle Meriweather, feeling helplessly that something was wrong
with the universe, and that, since it was different from anything he had
ever known in the past, he was unable to cope with it. Into his eyes,
gentle and bloodshot above his fierce white moustache--the eyes of one
who has never suffered the painful process of thinking things out, but
has accepted his opinions as unquestioningly as he has accepted his
religion or the cut of his clothes--there came the troubled look of one
who is struggling against forces that he does not understand. For
Gabriella was serious. There was not the slightest hope in the disturbed
mind of Uncle Meriweather that she was anything but perfectly serious.
Caprice, being a womanly quality, was not without a certain charm for
him. He was quite used to it; he knew how to take it; he had been taught
to recognize it from his childhood up. It was pretty, it was playful;
and his mind, if so ponderous a vehicle could indulge in such activity,
was fond of play. But after the first perplexed minute or two he had
relinquished forever the hope that Gabriella was merely capricious.
Clearly the girl knew what she was talking about; and this knowledge, so
surprising in one of her age and sex, gave him a strange dreamy sense of
having just awakened from sleep.

"I must say I like girls to be girls, Fanny," he pursued testily; "I
reckon I'm only an old fogy, but I like girls to be girls. When a woman
loses her innocence, she loses her greatest charm in the eyes of a
man--of the right sort of a man. Pluck the peach with the bloom on it,
my poor father used to say. He didn't believe in all this new-fangled
nonsense about the higher education of women--none of his daughters
could do more I than read and write and spell after a fashion, and yet