I remember that wedding as if it were yesterday.  I can see now, with Mary Marie’s manuscript before me, why it made so great an impression upon me.  It was a very quiet wedding, of course—­just the members of the family present.  But I shall never forget the fine, sweet loveliness of Mother’s face, nor the splendid strength and tenderness of Father’s.  And the way he drew her into his arms and kissed her, after it was all over—­well, I remember distinctly that even Aunt Hattie choked up and had to turn her back to wipe her eyes.

They went away at once, first to New York for a day or two, then to Andersonville, to prepare for the real wedding trip to the other side of the world.  I stayed in Boston at school; and because nothing of consequence happened all those weeks and months is the reason, I suspect, why the manuscript got tossed into the bottom of my little trunk and stayed there.

In the spring, when Father and Mother returned, and we all went back to Andersonville, there followed another long period of just happy girlhood, and I suspect I was too satisfied and happy to think of writing.  After all, I’ve noticed it’s when we’re sad or troubled over something that we have that tingling to cover perfectly good white paper with “confessions” and “stories of my life.”  As witness right now what I’m doing.

And so it’s not surprising, perhaps, that Mary Marie’s manuscript still lay forgotten in the little old trunk after it was taken up to the attic.  Mary Marie was happy.

And it was happy—­that girlhood of mine, after we came back to Andersonville.  I can see now, as I look back at it, that Father and Mother were doing everything in their power to blot out of my memory those unhappy years of my childhood.  For that matter, they were also doing everything in their power to blot out of their own memories those same unhappy years.  To me, as I look back at it, it seems that they must have succeeded wonderfully.  They were very happy, I believe—­Father and Mother.

Oh, it was not always easy—­even I could see that.  It took a lot of adjusting—­a lot of rubbing off of square corners to keep the daily life running smoothly.  But when two persons are determined that it shall run smoothly—­when each is steadfastly looking to the other’s happiness, not at his own—­why, things just can’t help smoothing out then.  But it takes them both.  One can’t do it alone.  Now, if Jerry would only—­

But it isn’t time to speak of Jerry yet.

I’ll go back to my girlhood.

It was a trying period—­it must have been—­for Father and Mother, in spite of their great love for me, and their efforts to create for me a happiness that would erase the past from my mind.  I realize it now.  For, after all, I was just a girl—­a young girl, like other girls; high-strung, nervous, thoughtless, full of my whims and fancies; and, in addition, with enough of my mother and enough of my father within me to make me veritably a cross-current and a contradiction, as I had said that I was in the opening sentence of my childish autobiography.