How good to be able to write you like this! I am so tired of keeping things to myself. We shall be starting for home some time in October, I believe. I shall hope to write you, but if I do not, think of me still, in spite of all silences, as _Your loving friend_, _Azalea_. CHAPTER XIII CROSSROADS Mallowbanks, November 15. _Carin_, _always best and dearest_: Here I am, back again. Back from England, back from Italy. The first seemed to me like the great Mother of my Mind; the second like the eternal Mother of my Soul. Always, as long as I live, I shall dream of them. And this is a good place for dreaming. Indeed, there is little else to do here. The old house lies in perpetual quiet. The garden is dead again. You will remember that I have only seen it when it was dead. I did not mean to do it, but by accident, when I was walking in it, I came on the little pool where my darling grandmother was drowned, and there were the three swans, aimlessly floating about, just as they did that terrible twilight. But I don’t know that the swans go about any more aimlessly than we do here in the house. There is very little coming and going, for we are in mourning. Uncle does not take a daily paper. He says it frets him and that there is really no use. He says he can get all the essentials from the _Weekly Eyrie_. And so, I suppose, he can. But all this helps to keep us very quiet. It is as if we lived in an ivory tower. We might be enchanted, so little do we know of other lives than our own. I said something like this to Aunt Lorena, and she replied: “It is only the reaction after your journey. A person is likely to feel rather let down on first coming home from a tour. Can you not amuse yourself, Azalea, thinking over the places you have seen? Oughtn’t you to be taking up your French again? I think I had better arrange for Monsieur Angier to come from Charleston once a week to teach you.” I thanked her, and went away to my room, presumably to do as she recommended and “think.” But thinking is not living, Carin, and I want to live. I don’t want to remember. I want to do! I’m tired of having other people do things for me; I’m tired of being treated as if I were better than other people; I’m tired of being cheated of my youth by being made to act as if I were seventy. Yes, that is what it amounts to. I am being cheated of my youth. I am so strong and well, so restless and full of energy that I nearly expire in this soft house, where everyone goes quietly, and where we must not even pass things at the table lest we break rules. Carin, I want to “reach” for the bread and to eat it with mountain honey, and I’m starving for one of Ma McBirney’s corn cakes, and I’d like better than anything to have some bacon and eggs for _dinner_—with just barely enough to go around.