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 own mother. As soon as
I've made this widowhood hurdle--well, I'm going to spend a lot of time
buying tobacco with him in his Hup runabout, which sounds as if it was
named for himself.

And when that conflagration was lighted in me about my début, Tom did
it. I was sitting peaceably on my own front steps, dressed in the
summer-before-last that Judy washes and irons every day while I'm
deciding how to hand out the first sip of my trousseau to the neighbors,
when Tom, in a dangerous blue-striped shirt, with a tie that melted into
it in tone, blew over my hedge and landed at my side. He kissed the lace
ruffle on my sleeve while I reproved him severely and settled down to
enjoy him. But I didn't have such an awfully good time as I generally do
with him. He was too full of another woman, and even a first cousin can
be an exasperation in that condition.