Yes, Carin, it was like that. I am not ungrateful. I like this life; a part of me answers to it completely. Yet, somehow, I believe it has come too late. I feel that sooner or later I shall go back to the mountain and stay there. I miss the red roads and the misty dawns and the still, still moonlights, with me answering the whippoorwill and the owl. I miss Ma McBirney and the little graves under the Pride of India tree. I am just Azalea the mountain girl after all, I am afraid, though they keep telling me how gay I am and how I fit into my present life, and congratulating me because I never seem to be tired.
But I was secretly very tired when at last the week of festivities was over. There had been a great company of us at Thanksgiving dinner, and we had seen and tasted all that was most splendid in the way of Mallowbanks ham and Mallowbanks turkey, and Mallowbanks artichokes and mince meat, and we had talked and laughed and sung and danced, and bowed and scraped, and shaken hands and kissed, and at last it was all over. Even my darling Annie Laurie and my little Barbara were gone. And then I went up to my own room and closed and bolted the door.
Carin, I wept and wept. I was happy, but I wept. For, someway, after all, this was not my life. It was not the silver web I meant to weave. It was something that was being woven for me, and I was only a quite nice little yellow spider sitting in the midst of it and being admired without doing a single bit of spinning.
It was not at all what I had planned for myself. I am doing a great deal of receiving and little or no giving, and it makes me dissatisfied.
Of course I give some happiness to grandmother, and a new responsibility to Uncle David and Aunt Lorena. But what of my vocation? What of all the things I learned to do with these two hands of mine? What of the friendships I made with humble people and needy ones? What of all the good I was going to do in the world?
Carin, I am very happy. You mustn’t think anything else. But I have cried a tremendous lot, and I’m going to cry when I feel like it. And by and by I shall do something. It will not be liked very well at Mallowbanks—at least, not at first. But we have to be our true selves, don’t we? Don’t we owe that to—well I don’t know just Whom or What we owe it to. But we are made so much ourselves that to be anything other than ourselves is to offend what Kipling calls the God of Things as They Are.