For, Oh, Carin, there is a place where I am needed. It is at Lee, at the Mountain Industries. I know that no one else can look after them as well as I. Who else knows so many of the mountain people? With whom would they be as free and friendly as with Azalea McBirney, the waif-girl they saw grow up among them, the girl they taught to weave and sew and knit? And now that I have been so much with people of a different sort, I mean with the friends of my uncle and aunt, I am fairly well qualified to meet the other sort of people, too, the visitors to Lee, who are the patrons of the Industries. Yes, I should feel quite at ease with them now. I think I would know ways of bringing them and the mountain people together.
That introduces me to a perfectly beautiful thought! What is more, it is the first time I have reached it. I am glad I came across it when I was writing to you, because that lets you in at the find. It is this: All I have lived and experienced the last year has simply been a part of my preparation for doing what I always wanted to do. It has made me twice as fit as I was before, to be the friend and teacher of my dear mountain people. Isn’t that so, Sister Carin? Am I not ready now to come back to Lee and take my place there, and to spin my silver web? Oh, Carin, now, at last, I can be the woman your dear father and mother wanted me to be. I can serve the people toward whom I feel the greatest loyalty—the people of the mountains, to whom, for Mother McBirney’s sake, I owe endless gratitude. But gratitude quite aside, I want to do it for myself. I want to be helped in helping them. I want to live in broadening their lives.
So I think I am going to make up my mind to come back to Lee.
Yes, I think I am.
. . .
I can feel myself making up my mind!
. . .
It is made up!
I am going over to Delight Ravanel’s to tell her about it. She will object, and then I can listen to my own arguments and make myself sure I am doing right. Then I shall come home and let Uncle David and Aunt Lorena know.
How excited I am!