“Is it all right?” she asked, as I laid it down.
“Yes,” I answered, “but if he likes you, and you hurt him, you ought to say you are sorry for that—”
She nodded quickly, and reached for her pen. “What would you say?” she asked, as she looked down, uncertainly, at her lovely monogramed paper.
“If I liked him, really,” I said, “I would write a postscript. I’d say something like, ‘Dear Ben, I like you, and I didn’t mean those things I said when I was cross. I will be very grateful if you will forgive me—’”
And she wrote just that.
“It doesn’t sound like me,” she commented in a voice that shook. “It’s—it’s too nice.” And, again, she wiped away tears.
I leaned over, and folded the sheet, and stuck it in the envelope and sealed it, as Leslie laughed in a funny, weak way.
“Where are your stamps?” I asked. She told me, and I licked one and stuck it on. Then we kissed each other, and that was unusual. I never was so very much for kissing everybody all the time, and I think when girls do, too much, it’s silly, but it was different that night. Then I went out and laid the letter on the table in the hall—we always left them there for the first person who went out to take, and then I looked in to see that Viola was still sleeping, and after that I went to bed.
That day began a new sort of life for us all. The tragedy that came to Viola was like a stone that is thrown into the center of a still pool. All sorts of widening circles grew from her trouble, and she, herself, found through it a new depth. I don’t mean that everything changed in a day, for things don’t change in that manner, but all the time Viola was building up new habits in place of the old ones that were crumbling away.
I saw the roots of a fine strong habit, on the day when she got the first letter from home written after her father died.