face tight until you look like a Christmas mask to get
your neck muscles taut, and then wobble your head round like a new-born
baby until it swims. I did that one twenty extra times and all the
others in proportion to make up for those two hours in bed. Hereafter
I'll get up at the time directed on page three, or maybe earlier. It
frightens me to think that I've got only a few weeks more to turn from a
cabbage-rose into a lily. I won't let myself even think "perfect flower"
and "scarlet runner." If I do, I get warm and happy all over. I try when
I get hungry to think of myself in that blue muslin dress.

I haven't been really willing before to write down in this wretched
volume that I took that garment to the city with me and what Madame
Rene did to it--remade it into the loveliest thing I ever saw, only I
wouldn't let her alter the size one single inch. I'm honourable, as all
women are at peculiar times. I think she understood, but she seemed not
to, and worked a miracle on it with ribbon and lace. I've put it away
on the top shelf of a cupboard, for it is a torment to look at it.

* * * * *

You can just take any recipe for a party and it will make a good
debut for a girl, but it takes more time to concoct one for a widow,
especially if it is for yourself. I spent all the rest of the day doing
almost nothing and thinking until I felt light-headed. Finally I had
just about given up any idea of a party and had decided to leak out
in general society as quietly as my clothes would let me, when a real
conflagration was lighted inside me.

If Tom Pollard wasn't my own first cousin I would have loved him
desperately, even if I am a week older than he. He was about the only
oasis in my childhood's days, though I don't think anybody would think
of calling him at all green. He never stopped coming to see me
occasionally, and Mr. Carter liked him. He was the first man to notice
the white ruche I sewed in the neck of my old black silk four or five
months ago, and he let me see that he noticed it out of the corner of
his eyes as we were coming out of church, under Aunt Adeline's very
elbow.

And when that conflagration was lighted in me about my debut, Tom
did it. I was sitting peaceably in my own summer-house, dressed in
the summer-before-last that Jane washes and irons every day while
I am deciding how to hand out the first sip of my trousseau to the
neighbours, when Tom, in a dangerous blue-