‘I oughtn’t to have begun it, ought I?’ she murmured. ‘I oughtn’t to have gone to see you that first time. But I did want to. I guess I’ve always been a little foolish about you. I don’t know what first put it into my head, unless it was Ántonia, always telling me I mustn’t be up to any of my nonsense with you. I let you alone for a long while, though, didn’t I?’
She was a sweet creature to those she loved, that Lena Lingard!
At last she sent me away with her soft, slow, renunciatory kiss.
‘You aren’t sorry I came to see you that time?’ she whispered. ‘It seemed so natural. I used to think I’d like to be your first sweetheart. You were such a funny kid!’
She always kissed one as if she were sadly and wisely sending one away forever.
We said many good-byes before I left Lincoln, but she never tried to hinder me or hold me back. ‘You are going, but you haven’t gone yet, have you?’ she used to say.
My Lincoln chapter closed abruptly. I went home to my grandparents for a few weeks, and afterward visited my relatives in Virginia until I joined Cleric in Boston. I was then nineteen years old.
BOOK IV. The Pioneer Woman’s Story
I
Two years after I left Lincoln, I completed my academic course at Harvard. Before I entered the Law School I went home for the summer vacation. On the night of my arrival, Mrs. Harling and Frances and Sally came over to greet me. Everything seemed just as it used to be. My grandparents looked very little older. Frances Harling was married now, and she and her husband managed the Harling interests in Black Hawk. When we gathered in grandmother’s parlour, I could hardly believe that I had been away at all. One subject, however, we avoided all evening.