I had just passed my sixteenth birthday when we all came back to live in Andersonville.  For the first few months I suspect that just the glory and the wonder and joy of living in the old home, with Father and Mother happy together, was enough to fill all my thoughts.  Then, as school began in the fall, I came down to normal living again, and became a girl—­just a growing girl in her teens.

How patient Mother was, and Father, too!  I can see now how gently and tactfully they helped me over the stones and stumbling-blocks that strew the pathway of every sixteen-year-old girl who thinks, because she has turned down her dresses and turned up her hair, that she is grown up, and can do and think and talk as she pleases.

I well remember how hurt and grieved and superior I was at Mother’s insistence upon more frequent rubbers and warm coats, and fewer ice-cream sodas and chocolate bonbons.  Why, surely I was old enough now to take care of myself!  Wasn’t I ever to be allowed to have my own opinions and exercise my own judgment?  It seemed not!  Thus spoke superior sixteen.

As for clothes!—­I remember distinctly the dreary November rainstorm of the morning I reproachfully accused Mother of wanting to make me back into a stupid little Mary, just because she so uncompromisingly disapproved of the beaded chains and bangles and jeweled combs and spangled party dresses that “every girl in school” was wearing.  Why, the idea!  Did she want me to dress like a little frump of a country girl?  It seems she did.

Poor mother!  Dear mother!  I wonder how she kept her patience at all.  But she kept it.  I remember that distinctly, too.

It was that winter that I went through the morbid period.  Like our childhood’s measles and whooping cough, it seems to come to most of us—­us women children.  I wonder why?  Certainly it came to me.  True to type I cried by the hour over fancied slights from my schoolmates, and brooded days at a time because Father or Mother “didn’t understand,” I questioned everything in the earth beneath and the heavens above; and in my dark despair over an averted glance from my most intimate friend, I meditated on whether life was, or was not, worth the living, with a preponderance toward the latter.

Being plunged into a state of settled gloom, I then became acutely anxious as to my soul’s salvation, and feverishly pursued every ism and ology that caught my roving eye’s attention, until in one short month I had become, in despairing rotation, an incipient agnostic, atheist, pantheist, and monist.  Meanwhile I read Ibsen, and wisely discussed the new school of domestic relationships.

Mother—­dear mother!—­looked on aghast.  She feared, I think, for my life; certainly for my sanity and morals.