“That was a lovely song you sang about ‘Molly darling,’ Billy,” I said.  “Where did you hear it?”

“That’s a good frog-song, Molly, and I believe I can git a squirrel with it, too, if I sing it quite low.”  He began to squirm out of my arms toward the table and the glass.

“Who taught it to you, sugar-sweet?” I persisted as I poured water in on the frog under his direction.

“Nobody taught it to me.  Father sings it to me when Tilly, nurse, nor you aren’t there to put me to bed.  He don’t know no good songs like ‘Black-eyed Susan’ or ‘Little Boy Blue.’  I go to sleep quick ’cause he makes me feel tired with his slow tune what’s only good for frogs and things.  Get a piece of cloth to tie over the top of the glass, Molly, quick!”

I found some, and I don’t know why my hand trembled as I handed it to Billy.  As soon as he got it he climbed out of the window, glass, frog and all, and I saw him and the old setter go down the garden walk together in pursuit of the desired squirrel, I suppose.  I closed the blinds and drew the curtains again and flung myself on my pillow.  Something warm and sweet seemed to be sweeping over me in great waves, and I felt young and close up to some sort of big world-good.  It was delicious, and I don’t know how long I would have stayed there just feeling it if Jane hadn’t brought in my letter.

He had written from London, and it was many pages of wonderful things all flavoured with me.  He told me about Miss Clinton and what good friends they were, and how much he hoped she would be in Hillsboro when he got here.  He said that a great many of her dainty 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 round 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 “perfect flower” and “scarlet runner.”  If I do, I get warm and happy all over.  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 wretched volume that I took that garment to the city with me and what Madame Rene did to it—­remade it into the loveliest thing I ever saw, only I 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.