de Marsignan!

Mrs. Eustis was a fair, plump little partridge of a woman, so
perfectly satisfied with herself that brains, in her case, would have
amounted to a positive calamity. She is an instance of the fascination
a fool seems to have for men of undoubted powers of mind and heart,
for Eustis, who had both to an unusual degree, loved her devotedly,
even while he smiled at her. She had, after some years of
childlessness, laid him under an everlasting obligation by presenting
him with a daughter, an obligation deepened by the fact that the
child was in every sense her father's child, not her mother's.

That afternoon she brought the little girl with her, to make our
acquaintance. When the child, shyly friendly, looked up, it seemed to
me for an anguished moment as if another little girl had walked out of
the past, so astonishingly like was she to that little lost playmate
of my youth. Right then and there Mary Virginia walked into my heart
and took possession, as of a place swept and garnished and long
waiting her coming.

When we knew her better my mother used to say that if she could have
chosen a little girl instead of the little boy that had been I, she
must have chosen Mary Virginia Eustis out of all the world.

Like Judge Mayne's Laurence, she chose to make the Parish House her
second home--for indeed my mother ever seemed to draw children to her,
as by some delightful magic. Here, then, the child learned to sew and
to embroider, to acquire beautiful housewifely accomplishments, and to
speak French with flawless perfection; she reaped the benefit of my
mother's girlhood spent in a convent in France; and Mrs. Eustis was