Blurb: This is a missing scene from my modern Persuasion what-if, If Only There Was A Word Called Adulting . Grandma Stevenson, Anne’s maternal grandmother (who assumes the role of Lady Russell from canon in this narrative) has raised the three Elliot girls since their mother died in childbirth while giving birth to Mary. She tries to convince nineteen-year-old Anne that there are other fish in the sea besides Frederick Wentworth.

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Anne Elliot, with all her claims of birth, beauty, and mind, to throw herself away at nineteen; involve herself at nineteen in an engagement with a young man, who had nothing but himself to recommend him, and no hopes of attaining affluence, but in the chances of a most uncertain profession, and no connexions to secure even his farther rise in the profession, would be, indeed, a throwing away, which she grieved to think of! – Jane Austen, Persuasion

With all three girls away from home for the first time – Elizabeth and Anne in college, and Mary in her first year at boarding school – the house had felt strangely empty all year long. I didn’t realize how much of my daily routine was built around the girls, until they all went away and left me with wide stretches of time looming in my days, bereft of purpose for the first time in decades. But never mind – the school year would be ending soon, and with the summer, they would all come flocking back underneath my wing again. I counted the days as each one grew longer, eagerly waiting for spring semester to end and my world to get back to rights.

“Anne, I’ve missed you most of all,” I said. Of all the girls, Anne was the only one who called me dutifully every week, and I told her not to worry about the expense, she could call collect and talk to me for as long as she wanted. She rarely hung up without talking to me for at least an hour, but she never took up my offer to cover the costs, insisting that she could afford it on her pay from her campus job. “Just think, three more weeks and you’ll be back. Don’t you miss Sarah and Jemima’s cooking? You must be terribly thin, having nothing but the residence hall food to eat, but we’ll fatten you up when you get home.”

“I’m so sorry to disappoint you, Grandma,” came Anne’s reply, “but I won’t be coming home just yet. I’ve enrolled in summer school, so I’ll be staying on campus till August.”

“Summer school?” I was appalled. Living in that dorm was a terrible privation, and she actually wanted to prolong it for almost the entire summer? “But that means you’ll hardly have any time at home before fall semester! You need to rest and recharge; nobody can live in that ascetic environment for so many months on end without burning out. At only nineteen, you’re far too young to throw away all your opportunities for summer enjoyment.”

“Nineteen is old enough for me to think about my future,” Anne came back with her usual calmness, but somehow it sounded ominous. “I’ve decided to do two majors in four years. You know my passion is for aeronautical engineering, but I want to add a major in mechanical so I can help Father out with the family business if I ever need to. And besides, if I clear my humanities requirements in the summer, I can pass all my books and notes on to Frederick next semester.”

Frederick . There it was again, the name of that boy she couldn’t stop talking about. It had been almost six months by now – wasn’t that a long enough time for any teenage infatuation to run its course?

“Well, if I recall correctly, you said he’d be going down to Texas for the summer,” I pointed out. “That’s a long time for a teenage boy, long enough for him to charm a hundred girls.” Never in my life had I stooped to hyperbole, and I wasn’t going to begin now. “All right, I exaggerate. But take my word for it, no nineteen-year-old boy is going to spend a summer away from home without sowing wild oats left and right; it’s convenient for them, after all. Besides, isn’t that what he’s taking flying lessons for, to impress the girls? I wish you didn’t have to learn this lesson when you’re still so young, but you shouldn’t be surprised if he’s forgotten all about you by fall semester.”

“He won’t,” said Anne confidently. “We’ve agreed to be exclusive, and I know he’s going to keep his word; he’s a man of honour.”

A man ? At nineteen? That’s preposterous. Even more so, after I found out where he came from. Mere miles separate Grosse Pointe and Detroit, but that was the whole reason why the Pointe System was needed. It prevented people of his ilk, for the city of Detroit was full of such riffraff, from infiltrating our territory.

“Exclusive,” I said. “That’s a very adult word to use for a teenage infatuation. How exclusive are you going to be, if he drops out and fails to graduate? Have you researched the nationwide black college graduation rates? Or thought about how poorly inner-city schools prepare their students for college? When he drops out and goes back to the street life, are you still going to be ‘exclusive’ and follow him there?”

“I beg your pardon, but I don’t think ‘infatuation’ is the right word to use, when you get to know a person well and then you decide you love him. One semester isn’t a short time, and I dare say I know him better than any of the boys I got to meet in high school, because we’re all on the same campus day and night. And I don’t just believe he’s going to graduate, I know it. How could anyone who beats me hollow in all my math classes possibly not graduate? Especially when, as you pointed out, he’s doing it even in spite of not getting the kind of training we did in prep school. He told me all about how he skated out of Math Olympiad class in tenth grade because he got fed up with combinatorics, but that makes him even more determined to conquer that barrier now.”

Well, I was accustomed to Elizabeth thinking she knew better than me, but Anne had always been properly respectful of my considerable experience with the real world. College was corrupting her, more than I had realized.

“Even if that is so,” I pointed out, “you must remember you have a future beyond college. I know you probably aren’t thinking about marriage yet, you still have three more years of school ahead of you. But someday when you graduate, you’ll need to find someone suitable to build a life with.”

“Three years,” said Anne. “That’s still a long time more, and all I want to think about now is to study hard, have fun, and graduate. And then, to come out into the world and be useful to society. Nothing about that is going to change, it’ll all still happen anyway.”

“Are you sure? You say you love that boy. Well, what do you think happens when young people think they are in love? Do you think your father will pay for diapers if you’re saddled with a baby before you graduate? That’s why we sent you to an all-girls boarding school, to keep you from being tempted into things you shouldn’t be doing at that age.”

“We know what our responsibilities are,” Anne argued, “and we’ve been absolutely careful and disciplined. After all, graduating and getting commissioned is his only way out of the ‘hood, and he doesn’t want to mess up his chances either. I don’t think the military is such a terrible future, when it’s an honest profession that will pay him well, and everyone on campus thinks it’s really prestigious to get a full ride on ROTC.”

We . There it was again, for Anne only ever used that word for her and me before, but now she had transferred her allegiance to this unknown stranger from a completely different race and social strata.

“Anne, the military is romanticized in all the books you read. I might have been the one who stocked your bookshelf with historical novels about the Age of Sail, but all literature paints things in a rosier way than they really are. Think about all those troops who come back, missing an arm or a leg or haunted with PTSD. That’s why we won’t let you ride the subway when we go to New York, because the one time I took it, I was approached by a homeless vet asking for money. You shouldn’t throw away your life on someone who could end up like that, when you’re such a pretty and smart girl, from such a good family, too.”

“I suppose,” said Anne, mollified. “But maybe that vet became homeless precisely because he didn’t have anyone to love him and care for him when he came back. It’s appalling, how little our country does for its servicemen who are willing to sacrifice so much.”

“Well, think on it,” I told her. “You know how much of a degradation your father would consider it if you were to end up penniless, living with a decrepit husband and a brood of biracial children. He’d hardly wish to recognize you as a member of the family, even though you would always be my dear girl. And wouldn’t it be a miserable life for you both, if your only family refused to acknowledge you? It isn’t only you who would be unhappy – so would he, being isolated and shunned for trying to enter a level of society he wasn’t meant for.”

“Society is flat these days.” I thought Anne had acknowledged my point, but now it didn’t seem so. “We have friends, though my family will always remain dear to me. And I need to go now, I’m terribly behind on my project work and my team members are calling me.”

A decidedly male voice was calling Anne’s name in the background, and she hollered, “Be right there!” to him, before bidding me a hasty goodbye. I took my duty to my dearly departed daughter, my Elizabeth, very seriously, devoting my entire life to raising these girls to the life that was their birthright. And Anne had always taken my instruction, and her responsibilities, in absolute earnestness, until she met the boy who taught her how to throw away all the values that I’d imparted to her.

All the times she called me from college, Anne was never the first one to hang up before. But this time, she was.