She carried those words home with her, singing as she went.
CHAPTER II
He came early that Sunday afternoon, but she had been ready, waiting, long before she saw the buggy coming down the road.
She had tried to do her hair in a new way, putting it up in rag curlers the night before, working with it for hours that morning in the stuffy attic bedroom before the wavy mirror, combing it, putting it up, taking it down again, with a nervous fluttering in her wrists. In the end she gave it up. She rolled the long braid into its usual mass at the nape of her neck, and pinned on it a black ribbon bow.
She longed for a new white dress to wear that day. Her pink gingham, whose blue-and-white-plaid pattern had faded to blurred lines of mauve and pale pink, was hideous to her as she contemplated it stretched in all its freshly ironed stiffness on the bed. But it was the best she could do.
While she dressed, the sounds of the warm, lazy, spring morning floated in to her through the half-open window. The whinnying of the long-legged colt in the barnyard, the troubled, answering neigh of his mother from the pasture, the cackling of the hens, blended like the notes of a pastoral orchestra with the rising and falling whirr of steel on the grindstone. Under the stunted live-oak in the side-yard her father was sharpening an ax, while her little sister Mabel turned the crank and poured water on the whirling stone. The murmur of their talk came up to her, Mabel's shrill, continuous chatter, her father's occasional monosyllables. She heard without listening, and the sounds ran like an undercurrent of contentment in her thoughts.
When she had pinned her collar and put on her straw sailor she stood for a long time gazing into the eyes that looked back at her from the mirror, lost in a formless reverie.
"My land!" her mother said when she appeared in the kitchen. "What're you all dressed up like that for, this time of day?"
"I'm going driving," she answered, constrained. She had dreaded the moment. Her mother stopped, the oven door half open, a fork poised in her hand.
"Who with?"