I could not leave her there, of course; it would not do. After spreading
her out so, and making such a to-do over her affairs, it would be
absolutely necessary to account to the reader for her. I thought and
thought and studied and studied; but I arrived at nothing. I finally saw
plainly that there was really no way but one--I must simply give her the
grand bounce. It grieved me to do it, for after associating with her so
much I had come to kind of like her after a fashion, notwithstanding she
was such an ass and said such stupid irritating things and was so
nauseatingly sentimental. Still it had to be done. So, at the top of
Chapter XVII, I put in a "Calendar" remark concerning July Fourth, and
began the chapter with this statistic:

"Rowena went out in the back yard after supper to see the fireworks and
fell down the well and got drowned."

It seemed abrupt, but I thought maybe the reader wouldn't notice it,
because I changed the subject right away to something else. Anyway it
loosened up Rowena from where she was stuck and got her out of the way,
and that was the main thing. It seemed a prompt good way of weeding out
people that had got stalled, and a plenty good enough way for those
others; so I hunted up the two boys and said "they went out back one
night to stone the cat and fell down the well and got drowned." Next I
searched around and found old Aunt Patsy Cooper and Aunt Betsy Hale where
they were aground, and said "they went out back one night to visit the
sick and fell down the well and got drowned." I was going to drown some
of the others, but I gave up the idea, partly because I believed that if
I kept that up it would arouse attention, and perhaps sympathy with those
people, and partly because it was not a large well and would not hold any
more anyway.