wouldn't let her alter the size one single inch. I'm honourable, 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 cupboard, for it is a torment to look at it.

* * * * *

You can just take any recipe for a party and it will make a good
début 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 light-headed. Finally I had
just about given up any idea of a party 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 childhood's days, 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 silk four or five
months ago, and he let me see that he noticed it out of the corner of
his eyes as we were coming out of church, under Aunt Adeline's very
elbow.

And when that conflagration was lighted in me about my début, Tom
did it. I was sitting peaceably in my own summer-house, dressed in
the summer-before-last that Jane washes and irons every day while
I am deciding how to hand out the first sip of my trousseau to the
neighbours, when Tom, in a dangerous blue-striped shirt, with a tie that