It was Father this time who came to the rescue.  He pooh-poohed Mother’s fears; said it was indigestion that ailed me, or that I was growing too fast; or perhaps I didn’t get enough sleep, or needed, maybe, a good tonic.  He took me out of school, and made it a point to accompany me on long walks.  He talked with me—­not to me—­about the birds and the trees and the sunsets, and then about the deeper things of life, until, before I realized it, I was sane and sensible once more, serene and happy in the simple faith of my childhood, with all the isms and ologies a mere bad dream in the dim past.

I was seventeen, if I remember rightly, when I became worried, not over my heavenly estate now, but my earthly one.  I must have a career, of course.  No namby-pamby everyday living of dishes and dusting and meals and babies for me.  It was all very well, of course, for some people.  Such things had to be.  But for me—­

I could write, of course; but I was not sure but that I preferred the stage.  At the same time there was within me a deep stirring as of a call to go out and enlighten the world, especially that portion of it in darkest Africa or deadliest India.  I would be a missionary.

Before I was eighteen, however, I had abandoned all this.  Father put his foot down hard on the missionary project, and Mother put hers down on the stage idea.  I didn’t mind so much, though, as I remember, for on further study and consideration, I found that flowers and applause were not all of an actor’s life, and that Africa and India were not entirely desirable as a place of residence for a young woman alone.  Besides, I had decided by then that I could enlighten the world just as effectually (and much more comfortably) by writing stories at home and getting them printed.

So I wrote stories—­but I did not get any of them printed, in spite of my earnest efforts.  In time, therefore, that idea, also, was abandoned; and with it, regretfully, the idea of enlightening the world at all.

Besides, I had just then (again if I remember rightfully) fallen in love.

Not that it was the first time.  Oh, no, not at eighteen, when at thirteen I had begun confidently and happily to look for it!  What a sentimental little piece I was!  How could they have been so patient with me—­Father, Mother, everybody!

I think the first real attack—­the first that I consciously called love, myself—­was the winter after we had all come back to Andersonville to live.  I was sixteen and in the high school.

It was Paul Mayhew—­yes, the same Paul Mayhew that had defied his mother and sister and walked home with me one night and invited me to go for an automobile ride, only to be sent sharply about his business by my stern, inexorable Aunt Jane.  Paul was in the senior class now, and the handsomest, most admired boy in school.  He didn’t care for girls.  That is, he said he didn’t.  He bore himself with a supreme indifference that was maddening, and that took (apparently) no notice of the fact that every girl in school was a willing slave to the mere nodding of his head or the beckoning of his hand.