To be left alone--_alone!_--on a squalid, wretched farm, with a dirty old woman, a woman who had been a servant,--she, Hildegardis Graham, the idol of her parents, the queen of her "set" among the young people, the proudest and most exclusive girl in New York, as she had once (and not with displeasure) heard herself called! What would Madge Everton, what would all the girls say! How they would laugh, to hear of Hilda Graham living on a farm among pigs and hens and dirty people! Oh! it was intolerable; and she sprang up and paced the floor, with burning cheeks and flashing eyes.
The thought of opposing the plan did not occur to her.

Mrs.Graham's rule, gentle though it was, was not of the flabby, nor yet of the elastic sort.

Her decisions were not hastily arrived at; but once made, they were final and abiding.

"You might just as well try to oppose the Gulf Stream!" Mr.Graham would say.

"They do it sometimes with icebergs, and what is the result?
In a few days the great clumsy things are bowing and scraping and turning somersaults, and fairly jostling each other in their eagerness to obey the guidance of the insidious current.