There were times when he forgot the "Miss" before the "Molly," and there were other times when she had to slip her hand from his ever so deftly.

And once when they were walking over a smooth new wooden sidewalk coming home, he caught her swiftly by the waist and began waltzing and humming "The Blue Danube." And at the end of the smooth walk, she had to step distinctly away from him to release his arm.

But she was twenty-one, and one does not always know how to do things at twenty-one--even when one intends to do them, and intends strongly and earnestly--that one would do at forty-one, and so as they stood under the Culpepper elm by the gate that night,--under the elm, stripped gaunt and naked by the locusts,--and the July moon traced the skeleton of the tree upon the close-cropped sod, we must not blame Molly Culpepper too much even if she let him, hold her hand a moment too long after he had kissed it a formal good night; for twenty-one is not as strong as its instincts.
It is such a little while to learn all about a number of important things in a big and often wicked world that when a little man or a little woman, so new to this earth as twenty-one years, gets a finger pinched in the ruthless machinery, it is a time for tears and mothering and not for punishment.

And so when Adrian Brownwell pulled the little girl off her feet and kissed her and asked her to marry him all in a second, and she could only struggle and cry "No, no!" and beg him to let her go--it is not a time to frown, but instead a time to go back to our twenty-ones and blush a little and sigh a little, and maybe cry and lie a little, and in the end thank God for the angel He sent to guard us, and if the angel slept--thank God still for the charity that has come to us.
The next day John Barclay had Colonel Martin Culpepper and Lige Bemis in his office galvanizing them with his enthusiasm and coaching them in their task.

They were to promise three dollars an acre, August 15, to every farmer who would put a mortgage on his land for six dollars an acre.