Bad, dear, bad Carin:
You didn’t come to my party! Oh, wretched, false friend, best and most cherished, why did you not come? Can it be that a mere desire to have higher marks than anyone else in school caused you to desert me in my hour of triumph? It was that, I know. You are trying to get that old Phi Beta Kappa key—which you’ll not wear after you do get it. I call it intellectual pride, I do indeed.
Keefe couldn’t come either. He had an order to do a portrait for some Great Lady. So he wouldn’t even think of coming. He said he was in the Right Mood for Work, and he expected me to tremble before those awful words, just as you expected me to tremble before your Phi Beta Kappa record. You two, doing your duty with all your might and leaving me alone in my frivolity! I call it shabby of you.
Well, anyway, Annie Laurie came and Barbara Summers with her. Barbara put little Jonathan in the care of Aunt Zillah Pace, and she kept saying that she felt perfectly all right about him, though one could see that she didn’t. It was the first time she ever had left him overnight, and so it was natural for her to feel nervous. Though, as you know, Jonathan is going to insist on being taken care of, and if there is anything he wants he is going to have it. He is such a dear that no one can refuse him anything, as I know to my cost! The treasures of mine that child has broken!
Yes, those two came, and I leave you to imagine how happy it made me. There was my little brown Barbara with her sweet voice and her shy-eager eyes, all dressed so quaintly, and being so desirous of pleasing everyone, and yet holding to her own ideas with that darling dignity of hers; and there was my big, glorious Annie Laurie Pace with her red hair and her definite ways, trying to be frivolous with the rest of us, and looking like a preoccupied Diana all the time. I had some fears that when the folk at Mallowbanks learned that what she really was preoccupied with was her own dairy, that they might cast her into the outer darkness where the vast company of people-the-Knoxes-do-not-know drag out their miserable lives. But no, the vast fields of Annie Laurie—they did not lose a rod in my description of them—the cattle on a thousand hills, more or less, and the well trained force of helpers appealed to their imagination. They regarded her as a Planter—or a Plantress. She was accepted. And she was accepted all the more because she really and truly didn’t care much whether she was or not. Annie Laurie came to Mallowbanks for the sole purpose of making me happy, and she certainly succeeded. I put her in my room, and I slept on a lounge in the dressing room. So we contrived to be together, and of course, just like the girls in the song, we let down our hair before the fire after the ball.
But I must come to the subject of the ball.
To begin with, Mallowbanks was full of guests who had come to stay for two nights, or four, or seven, as the case might be. They were kin or near-kin, or old neighbors who were as dear as kin, and they all called each other by their first names. All the men, or nearly all, had military or judicial titles; and the women were lovely and, in a way, willful—because they had been much loved, I suppose. From first to last it seemed to me like one of my old dreams and nothing else.
My coming-out party was in several parts.
To begin with, there was the afternoon reception. Ladies, mostly, came to that, though there were some men, too. This was preceded by a luncheon for forty. (There were little tables scattered all over the drawing-room, as well as the dining room.) The next day there was a ball. That was the culmination. And all week there have been rides and drives and dinners and breakfasts and teas. I have met hundreds of people. I like them all. I love none, save the people here in my own house, and Annie Laurie and my little Barbara. I met Ravanels and Grévys and Bryces, but one and all neglected to ask my hand in marriage. There was, indeed, only one I would think of marrying, and, Oh, you yellow-headed little Hun, I had not talked with him three minutes before I knew that he was your Southerner.
“I have a great many messages for you from your friend Miss Carson,” said he to me.