“In time for what?” she repeated aloud.
She stood, abstracted, grey eyes brooding the question.
What was there to dress for—to clean her white shoes for? Evening service. A slow stroll with some neighbour’s daughter along the village street. Gossip with other young people encountered in the lamp-lit dark. Banter with boys—passing the usual group clustered on fence or wall—jests born of rural wit, empty laughter, emptier retort—the slow stroll homeward.... This was what she dressed for.... Or for a party ... where the deadly familiarity of every face and voice had long since dulled her interest.... Where there was never any mental outlook; no aspiration, no stimulation—no response to her restless curiosity—where nobody could tell her “why.”
Standing there on the wood’s edge, she wondered why she was at pains to dress becomingly for the sake of such things as these.
She wondered why she cared for her person so scrupulously in a family where a bath a week was the rule—in a community where the drug-store carried neither orange-stick nor depilatory.
It is true, however, that with the advent of short skirts and prohibition it was now possible to purchase lipstick and powder-puff in White Hills. And State Troopers had been there twice looking for hootch.
There was a rumour in local ecclesiastical circles that the youth of White Hills was headed hellward.
As yet the sweet-fern was only in tassel; Eris could pick her way, without danger to her stockings, through the strip of rough clearing. She entered the woods, pensively, amid the dappled shadows of new leaves.
Everywhere her eyes discovered young ferns and wild blossoms. Trillium and bunch-berry were still in bloom; viburnum, too; violets, blue, yellow and white; and a few pink moccasin flowers and late anemones.