Maybe they are. The tuberose has a personality, strong friends and stout enemies, like some people. There is nothing negative about it. The fancy persists. Ah, I have it! Another little brain door swings wide. But it wasn’t a tuberose. Bobby and the big boys, his friends, have been on a tramp, they are again standing under my window, they have waked me with the old familiar whistle. Mother has said I may have the magnolias Bobby wants to send up at midnight if I won’t speak to the boys, if the boys won’t speak to me, and she has let Bobby suspend a cord from my second-story window. I am fourteen years old again, and through the half-closed shutters I am tugging desperately at those magnolias. Suppressed giggles from the boys, suppressed giggles from me, too, and they ascend with slow majesty. Inside the window the secret of their heaviness is revealed. Candy—tons of it. The devil gets every inhabitant of Marsville who dances, but in spite of the devil I waltz merrily to my bed. _September 24th. Sunday._ Yesterday one of those seemingly unimportant happenings that change the current of a life came to me. I look up from the garden seat here among my flowers and my eyes journey from one accustomed sight to another. The long, low, rambling, gray old house drowsing in the mellow, low-lying sunshine, beyond it the path past the honeysuckle arbour that leads straight to the old-fashioned spring house, the colts in the pasture, the cattle at the bars—it is all so familiar that I smile at the words I have written. I am changed, not my life. Yesterday I walked up to Marsville, a mile away, for the mail, as I mostly do Saturday mornings, and Ellinor Baxter joined me. Ellinor is not a native Marsvillian either. Back in the dim past she came for the health of one of her family. Ellinor has always had musical yearnings, quite a little talent, too. She is the village musician and music teacher, and this year she has an assistant. The assistant is fresh from a bigger life: last winter she studied in Boston, and she has a friend who is doing wonderful things in Grand Opera abroad. It makes Ellinor quite tragic. Yesterday when we reached the edge of the wood, and the mountain world lay about us like a vast picture, Ellinor flung out her arms as if to embrace all the several hundred peaks in sight and cried out: “Oh, how I hate that wall of mountains! If we could sweep it away we’d get a view, Caroline. We’d see what the world is doing. It’s a prison wall. I can’t escape. It seems that some hand of iron holds me here. If I had only gone eight years ago when mother’s death gave me the freedom to go! Now I haven’t the youth to make a new life for myself. Why don’t you go? What holds you here?” “John, dear, good old John, I suppose,” I answered slowly.