The postman eyed me with quizzical fatherliness. "Ask your mother," he answered, reluctantly, and I turned and groped my way leaden-footed up the stairs, muttering, "Oh, mother, mother, I don't need to ask you."
When I got back to my room at last through a tortuous maze of gaping workmen and sickening flowers, three startled girls jumped up to catch me as I staggered across the threshold. I did not faint, I did not cry out. I just sat huddled on the floor rocking myself to and fro, and mumbling, as through a mouthful of sawdust: "Dolly Leonard is dead. Dolly Leonard is dead. Dolly Leonard is dead."
I will not attempt to describe too fully the scene that followed. There were seven of us, you know, and we were only eighteen, and no young person of our acquaintance had ever died before. Indeed, only one aged death had ever disturbed our personal life history, and even that remote catastrophe had sent us scampering to each other's beds a whole winter long, for the individual fear of "seeing things at night."
"Dolly Leonard is dead." I can feel myself yet in that huddled news-heap on the floor. A girl at the mirror dropped her hand-glass with a shivering crash. Some one on the sofa screamed. The only one of us who was dressed began automatically to unfasten her lace collar and strip off her silken gown, and I can hear yet the soft lush sound of a folded sash, and the strident click of the little French stays that pressed too close on a heaving breast.
Then some one threw wood on the fire with a great bang, and then more wood and more wood, and we crowded round the hearth and scorched our faces and hands, but we could not get warm enough.
Dolly Leonard was not even in our set. She was an older girl by several years. But she was the belle of the village. Dolly Leonard's gowns, Dolly Leonard's parties, Dolly Leonard's lovers, were the envy of all womankind. And Dolly Leonard's courtship and marriage were to us the fitting culmination of her wonderful career. She was our ideal of everything that a girl should be. She was good, she was beautiful, she was irresistibly fascinating. She was, in fact, everything that we girlishly longed to be in the revel of a ballroom or the white sanctity of a church.
And now she, the bright, the joyous, the warm, was colder than we were, and would never be warm again. Never again ... And there were garish flowers down-stairs, and music and favors and ices—nasty shivery ices,—and pretty soon a brawling crowd of people would come and dance because I was eighteen—and still alive.
Into our hideous brooding broke a husky little voice that had not yet spoken:
"Dolly Leonard told my big sister a month ago that she wasn't a bit frightened,—that she had had one perfect year, and a perfect year was well worth dying for—if one had to. Of course she hoped she wouldn't die, but if she did, it was a wonderful thing to die happy. Dolly was queer about it; I heard my big sister telling mother. Dolly said, 'Life couldn't always be at high tide—there was only one high tide in any one's life, and she thought it was beautiful to go in the full flush before the tide turned.'"