inty ways reminded him
of his "own slip of a girl", especially the turn of her head like a
"flower on its stem." At that I got right out of bed like a jack jumping
out of a box and looked at myself in the mirror.

There is one exercise here on page twenty that I hate worst of all. You
screw up your face tight until you look like a Christmas mask to get
your neck muscles taut and then wobble your head around like a new-born
baby until it swims. I did that one twenty extra times and all the
others in proportion to make up for those two hours in bed. Hereafter
I'll get up at the time directed on page three, or maybe earlier. It
frightens me to think that I've got only a few weeks more to turn from a
cabbage-rose into a lily. I won't let myself even think "luscious peach"
and "string-bean." If I do, I get warm and happy all over and let up on
myself. I try when I get hungry to think of myself in that blue muslin
dress.

I haven't been really willing before to write down in this torture
volume that I took that garment to the city with me and what Madam Rene
did to it--made it over into the loveliest thing I ever saw, only I
wouldn't let her alter the size one single inch. I'm honorable as all
women are at peculiar times. I think she understood, but she seemed not
to, and worked a miracle on it with ribbon and lace. I've put it away on
the top shelf of a closet, for it is torment to look at it.

You can just take any old recipe for a party and mix up a debut for a
girl, but it takes more time to concoct one for a widow, especially if
it is for yourself. I spent all the rest of the day doing almost nothing
and thinking until I felt lightheaded. Finally I had just about given up
any idea of a blaze and had decided to leak out in general society as
quietly as my clothes would let me, when a real conflagration was
lighted inside me.

If Tom Pollard wasn't my own first cousin I would have loved him
desperately, even if I am a week older than he. He was about the
only oasis in my marriage mirage, though I don't think anybody would
think of calling him at all green. He never stopped coming to see me
occasionally, and Mr. Carter liked him. He was the first man to notice
the white ruche I sewed in the neck of my old black taffeta four or five
months ago and he let me see that he noticed it out of the corner of his
eyes even right there in church, under Aunt Adeline's very elbow. He
makes love unconsciously and he flirts with his o