Oh, beautiful, beautiful life! In spite of trouble and sickness, perplexity and poverty, beautiful, beautiful life!
Dear Carin, don’t laugh at me if my letter has been a bit too ecstatic. You are surrounded all the time with fine teachers and brilliant friends, and moving, shifting life. I am just here by myself, so to speak. Yes, yes, dear, I know my own McBirneys are beside me. I have no desire deeper than the desire to help them. Yet, Carin, are they my kind of people? You know they are not; they know it. We try to be alike, but we cannot be, really.
I am the granddaughter of Colonel Atherton on one side; the granddaughter of some other proud old gentleman on the other side. For it was pride that made my grandfather Knox turn his son, my father, adrift. True, the McBirneys took me, a little ragged wanderer, orphaned and desolate, from a traveling show; but that was an accident in my life. It cannot change the fact that I have the tastes of the Athertons and the Knoxes, who have loved beauty and hospitality and other gracious things.
Oh, me, am I insinuating that Mother McBirney is not hospitable or that she does not love beauty? If so, shame on me. Her door stands open to every wanderer. It stood open to me. The flowers about her walls, and the purple valley below her hill, delight her. Yes, she is a true lover of beauty. May we never lose sight of each other, and to the last may I feel her hand waiting to grasp mine in whatever darkness she or I may have to walk through. I only say I wish I might, sometimes, have someone like you, my Carin, to talk with. Of course, there is Barbara Summers. But she is in the valley and I on the mountain.
Equally of course, there are Keefe O’Connor’s letters. And there are yours. Be sure you send me one soon.
Do not mind my changing moods. I am, after all, always the same old
Azalea.
P. S. This is the evening of the same day.
Who do you think called?
Mrs. Kitchell, Hi’s little brown mother, all in new clothes, with white cotton gloves on her hands—the hands that used to be so hard and scratched and battered with work. She had a red rose on her new fall hat, and her shoes were blacked. And you know what shoes are at Lee! The standard is low, owing to red mud and lack of elbow activity. But Mrs. Kitchell was grand. There is no other word for it.