“I never saw a coming-out dress like that in all my life,” said Aunt Lorena.
“Lorena,” said grandmother magnificently, “the Knoxes can afford to do as they please.”
But for my afternoon reception, to please Aunt Lorena, I wore drifting white stuff—white everything—and carried Killarney roses, and was just as conventional as I could be. Aunt Lorena kept pointing to me and saying:
“This is the way I want the child to look,” and at the ball grandmother said to her old friends: “Wouldn’t you think she was one of us all over again? Don’t you like a young girl to dress like that?”
Everybody agreed with Aunt Lorena, and everybody agreed with grandmother. And I was very happy all of the time.
No, I find I’m not going to describe the ball.
Why not?
Oh, because it was vague, after all—just meeting strange people and dancing with strange people, and trying to think of the right thing to say when people complimented me—as, of course, they thought they had to do—and being looked over and being told I was a perfect Knox, and hearing the music always, always, and feeling the dance get into my toes, and knowing my cheeks were burning and my eyes flaming, and wanting to put my face down in the cool moss on the bench of the mountain where the three tulip trees grow, and drink and drink of my spring till I was cooled in body and spirit.
Yes, Carin, it was like that. I am not ungrateful. I like this life; a part of me answers to it completely. Yet, somehow, I believe it has come too late. I feel that sooner or later I shall go back to the mountain and stay there. I miss the red roads and the misty dawns and the still, still moonlights, with me answering the whippoorwill and the owl. I miss Ma McBirney and the little graves under the Pride of India tree. I am just Azalea the mountain girl after all, I am afraid, though they keep telling me how gay I am and how I fit into my present life, and congratulating me because I never seem to be tired.