By this time I had worked through all my father's books and was ready to satisfy the itch of imagination even with the vicious inaccuracies of what was called Christian literature. The trouble all came of course of my not understanding the nature of a lie. Not that I couldn't tell a downright fib if I had to, or haven't on occasion, but a lie is to me just as silly a performance when it is about marriage or work as about the law of gravitation, and when it is presented to me in the form of human behaviour it makes me sick, like the smell of tuberoses in a close room; and I failed utterly to realize then that there are a great many people capable of living sincerely and at the same time blandly misrepresenting the facts of life in the interests of what is called morality. I do not think it probable that Cousin Judd accepted for himself the rule of behaviour prescribed by the books he recommended—I shall not tell you what they were, but if there are any Sunday-school libraries in Ohianna you will find them on the shelves—but I know that he and my mother esteemed them excellent for the young.
So far as they thought of it at all, they believed that in surrounding me with intimations of a life in which there was nothing more important than settling with Deity the minor details of living, and especially how much you would pay to His establishment, they had done their utmost to provide me with a life in which nothing more important could happen. If you were careful about reading the Bible and doing good to people—that is, persuading them to go to church and to leave off swearing—all the more serious details such as making a living, marrying and having children would take care of themselves; and the trouble was, as I have said, that I believed it. And that was how I found myself farthest from Art and Life at the time when I found myself a young lady.
I had to make this discovery for myself, for there were no social occasions in Taylorville to give a term to your advent into the grown-up world, though there was a definite privilege which marked your achievement of it. There was a period prior to this in which you bumped against things you were too old for, and carromed to the things for which you were quite too young, and about the end of your high-school term you had done with hair ribbons and begun to have company on your own account, and the sort of things began to happen which marked the point beyond which if you fell upon disaster it was your own fault. They happened to me.
By dint of my doing her compositions and of her doing my arithmetic, Pauline Allingham and I had managed to keep together all through the high school, and it was in our last year, when we used to put in the long end of the afternoons at Pauline's, playing croquet, that I first took notice of Tommy Bettersworth. The Bettersworth yard abutted on the Allingham's for the space of one woodshed and a horse-chestnut tree, and it was along in October that I began to be aware that it was not altogether the view of the garden that kept Tommy on the woodshed or in the chestnut tree the greater part of the afternoon. It may be that the adventure with Charlie Gower had sharpened my perception, at any rate it had aroused my discretion; I was carefully oblivious to the proximity of Tommy Bettersworth. But there came a day when Pauline was not, when she wanted to tell me something about Flora Haines which she was afraid he might overhear.
"Come around to the summer-house," she said, "Tommy's always hanging about; I can't think what makes him."
"Always?" I suggested.
"Why, you know yourself he was there last Saturday, and Thursday when we ..."
"Is he there when you and Flora are there, or only ..."
"Oh," Pauline gave a gasp, "No——Oh, I never thought ... Olive ... I do believe ... that's it!"
"Well, what?"