| CHAPTER | PAGE | |
| I | Grown Girls | [9] |
| II | New Relations | [27] |
| III | Own Folk | [46] |
| IV | Madam Grandmother | [64] |
| V | Mallowbanks | [82] |
| VI | My Ball | [101] |
| VII | Getting Settled | [120] |
| VIII | The Portrait | [139] |
| IX | Grandmother’s Story | [158] |
| X | “The Waters of Quiet” | [177] |
| XI | A Friend | [195] |
| XII | A Travel Log | [212] |
| XIII | Crossroads | [231] |
| XIV | “Where There Is a Will” | [250] |
| XV | “Ring, Happy Bells” | [267] |
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
| So, in a moment more I felt myself—I who had never been thrown in my life—going over Paprika’s head | Frontispiece |
| We stepped back in the shrubbery and kept very still while they passed. Grandmother was weeping like a hurt child | [84] |
| Azalea’s Coming Out Party | [114] |
| It was Keefe O’Connor who stood there holding out his hands to me | [276] |
CHAPTER I
GROWN GIRLS
Tennyson Mountain, N. C.,
October 6.
Carin, dear and far:
So you are back at your beloved Vassar! Does it seem as wonderful as it did last year? Or more so? More so, I expect. You were a little lonely and strange last year, you know. But now it will be different. The girls will seem like old friends to you now that you are coming back to them. But, Carin, girl, they cannot possibly be such old friends as I am, or as Annie Laurie is. Don’t dare to like one of them better than you like us. I can imagine, and really spend too much time imagining, just how lovely and cultivated and surprising some of them are. But, please, aren’t some of them quite stupid, too? I hope so. Annie Laurie hopes so. We want still to be the brightest stars in your sky.
Lest you should think we are not, we keep polishing ourselves. Annie Laurie, when she is not attending to her dairy, will take university extension work. And I, your own ever adoring, ever grateful Azalea, will keep hammering away at the books that dear Barbara Summers lends, and Keefe O’Connor sends down from New York, and those that your own library at the Shoals furnishes.
I have the heart to read, Carin, but not the time. That’s the truth. Or, come to think of it, perhaps it is a matter of eyelids. I have a queer, self-closing pair. If they would stay up after nine o’clock at night I could learn something. But, no, they appear to be attached to a wheel or a ratchet in the clock, and when nine strikes, down they go and down they stay.
What can I do?