I
They thought she had forgotten, because she never mentioned anything of that, never asked a question. But she hadn’t. No! She remembered, and at her worst and loneliest, she longed for the old times. Besides, she had three times heard Miss Amy relating the story when they believed her to be asleep in bed, and each time she had heard it told, the most immeasurable bitterness, the most devastating misery had rushed over her.
“Why ever was I born?” she used to cry to herself.
And hadn’t she also heard Miss Amy murmur, not imagining herself overheard, that: You can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear! What else can you expect from a girl like that?
It had hurt and angered her so; it had left her without gratitude, without even justice. She quite hated Miss Amy.
Lying in her bed that night all these feelings flamed in her with fiercest intensity, shame, bitterness, and, above all, a great and unassuaged grief for that incomparable friend whom she had lost, for the kind and sturdy Miss Julie, dead these five long years.
Miss Julie had meant to do a kindness. She intended—and if she had lived she would have succeeded in—benefiting Rosaleen.
“I remember it as if it were yesterday,” Miss Amy had begun her thrice-told tale, “The day that Julie brought her here....”
Well, and didn’t Rosaleen remember it, too? Who better?