Elizabeth bent her head over her knitting, and the colour mounted slowly to her forehead, but she did not speak.
"So you see, girl nature is pretty much girl nature, wherever you find it."
"I was going to write a letter to-night, Grandmother," Elizabeth said, after a period of silence, "and it wasn't going to be a very nice kind of a letter, because it—it was going to misrepresent things some. Now, I am going to write entirely differently, because things you've been saying have set me to thinking. I'd be willing to show you the letter, if you thought you ought to see it," she added, anxiously, but her grandmother only smiled.
"I ain't never very particular about reading other folks' letters," she said. "I have trouble enough reading those I write myself, and those that is sent to me."
"All right," Elizabeth said, in a very small voice, "I guess it's going to be hard enough to write it, anyway." This was the fateful epistle:
Dear Jeanie:
I want to begin by correcting an impression I was snobby enough to give you when I first came down here. I wrote you about this place and my grandparents in an entirely false way. I did it because I was too proud to own up the truth. I was surprised and shocked when I got here, to find how things really were. I hadn't been here since I was a little girl, and then only for very brief visits. I imagined a kind of Farm de-luxe and a grandmother in real lace and mitts, and a kind of Lord Chesterfieldian grandfather, and all the comforts of a château. Instead, my dear Granddaddy and dearest Grandmother are just—natives. They murder the President's English, and they sit around in their shirt sleeves—the former, not the latter—and they, well, they aren't like anything I've ever known. So I got started pretending, in my letters to you, and kept right on. The "car" is an old, rattletrap Ford, and Granddaddy drives it in his suspenders when he wants to. The chauffeur I sort of gave you the impression we had is a regular, farm hired man. Our hired girl sits at the table with us, and she is nice, too. They are all nice, nice people—nicer than I am. My grandmother is beautiful looking. I wish you could see her. I didn't care for any one to see her, for a while. Now, I am getting anxious for everyone to.
Jeanie, can you understand me or not? I'm just a prig, snob, liar, and I don't feel fit to live. I don't know what got into me. I always tell you everything, and now I deliberately did this awful thing, and I've got something else that I can't tell you, but that is not my secret.
Can you love me any more? I ask this seriously, because I know you won't mind my humble origin half as much as the deception. I knew this all the time, and yet I could not seem to help the way I was behaving.
I am afraid to read your letter in answer to this, so don't write me one. Let me hear from you by return mail, but don't say anything, not much, about this anyway. If you love me, though, please begin your letter by saying so. I don't deserve you for my most intimate friend. I've taken a new name. My great-grandmother's name, and I am going to live up to it. I took it so to be thoroughly part of my family, and to cultivate the old-fashioned virtues with. It's
Elspeth.
P. S.—Call me by it. Everything I told you about my birthday was so. They did all those beautiful things for me. I slightly camouflaged details, but it was all the way I said, except that Judidy ate with us. Aren't I a pig?
Elspeth again.
CHAPTER VI
The Bean Supper