“Yes.”
“Should you say I had changed for the worse or the better?”
“It is not a question of better or worse. You wrote me that you were the same old Azalea, but I do not find you so. Why, how meek you used to be!”
“Meek! I never was! I wouldn’t be! Meek!”
“When I think of you teaching those mountain children so lovingly, going around in your little pink sunbonnet, chatting by the hour with Mrs. Medicine Bottle—what was her name?—and look at you as you are now, and hear you talk as you do now—”
“Oh, very well,” I said. “I will withdraw my presence and my voice.”
So I did. I ran up to my room, and I found that pink gingham I used to wear up at Sunset Gap, and the funny little sunbonnet you used to think too becoming for a school-teacher. I put on the pink dress, though it was halfway up to my knees; I let my hair down my back in braids, and pulled the sunbonnet over it. Then I waited till I knew grandmother was sitting for her painter and I got Semmy to go down and knock on the door and call Mr. Painter out for a minute.
In that minute I ran in, kissed madam grandmother and bribed her to get behind a screen, and when our portrait painter returned, I was on the dais looking as demure as a kitten.
He came in looking at a letter Semmy had given him, and said:
“Will you pardon me, ma’am, for one moment?” He glanced through his letter. Then he bowed, and took up his brushes again. That was when he saw me. He gave a sort of a gasp and broke into the good old, beautiful smile we used to see on him up at Sunset Gap.