of Mr. Dickerson, if she did. She had a right to keep
all that from those who had no right to know it, but she had no right,
or if she had the right, she had not the power to act as if the past
had never been. She set herself to bear what was laid upon her, and if
she was ever to have strength for her burden she must begin by owning
her weakness. There was no one to whom she could own it but her mother,
and she did this fully as soon as she got back to her room, and could
sit down to answer her letter. She enclosed Dickerson's, and while she
did not spare him, she took the whole blame upon herself, for she said
she might have known that if she suffered him to see that he amused her
or pleased her at all, he was impudent enough to think that he could
make her like him again. "And mother," she wrote, "you know I never
really liked him, and was only too glad to get rid of him; you know
that much. But I suppose you will wonder, then, why I ever let him
speak to me if I really despised him as much as ever; and that is not
easy to explain. For one thing he was with Mrs. Montgomery, and she
likes him, and she has always been so good to me that I hated to treat
him badly before her; but that is not the real reason, and I am not
going to pretend it was. You know yourself how funny he is, and can
make you laugh in spite of yourself, but it was not that, either. It
was because I was angry with myself for having been angry with some one
else, without a cause, as I can see it now, and I had made a fool of
myself, and I wanted to get away from myself. I cannot tell you just
how it was, yet, and I do not know as I ever can, but that was truly
it, and nothing else, though the other things had something to do with
it. I suppose it was just like men when they take a drink of whiskey to
make them forget. The worst of it all is, and the discouraging part is,
that it shows me I have not changed a particle. My temper is just us
bad as ever, and I might as well be back at sixteen, for all the sense
I've got. Sometimes it seems to me that the past is all there is of us,
anyway. It seems to come up in me, all the time, and I am so ashamed I
don't know what to do. I make all kinds of good resolutions, and I want
to be good, and then comes something and it is all over with me. Then,
it appears as if it was not me, altogether, that is to blame. I know I
was to blame, this last time, laughing at that little 'scrub's' jokes
as you call him, and behav