“The best thing about Christina,” said she, “is that she is the daughter of a farmer.”

I struggled with this Christina idea, and tried to make it clear that she was nothing to me, that it was just a joke.  Grandma Thorndyke smiled.

“Of course you’d say that,” said she.

But the Christina myth grew wonderfully, and it made me more interesting to the other girls.

     “You look too high
     For things close by,
     And slight the things around you!”

So sang Zeruiah Strickler as she scrubbed my kitchen, and in pauses of her cheerful and encouraging song told of the helplessness of men without their women.  I really believed her, in spite of my success in getting along by myself.

“Why don’t you bring Virginia out some day?” I asked on one of these occasions, when it seemed to me that Grandma Thorndyke was making herself just a little too frequent a visitor at my place.

“Miss Royall,” said she, as if she had been speaking of the Queen of Sheba, “is busy with her own circle of friends.  She is now visiting at Governor Wade’s.  She is almost a member of the family there.  And her law matters take up a good deal of her time, too.  Mr. Gowdy says he thinks he may be able to get her property for her soon.  She can hardly be expected to come out for this.”

And grandma swept her hands about to cast down into nothingness my house, my affairs, and me.  This plunged me into the depths of misery.

So, when I furnished the cream for the donation picnic at Crabapple Grove in strawberry time, I went prepared to see myself discarded by my love.  She was there, and I had not overestimated her coldness toward me.  Buck Gowdy came for only a few minutes, and these he spent eating ice-cream with Elder Thorndyke, with Virginia across the table from him, looking at her in that old way of his.  Before he left, she went over and sat with Bob Wade and Kittie Fleming; but he joined them pretty soon, and I saw him bending down in that intimate way of his, first speaking to Kittie, and then for a longer time, to Virginia—­and I thought of the time when she would not even speak his name!

Once she walked off by herself in the trees, and looked back at me as she went; but I was done with her, I said to myself, and hung back.  She soon returned to the company, and began flirting with Matthias Trickey, who was no older than I, and just as much of a country bumpkin.  I found out afterward that right off after that, Matthias began going to see her, with his pockets full of candy with mottoes on it.  I called this sparking, and the sun of my hopes set in a black bank of clouds.  I do not remember that I was ever so unhappy, not even when John Rucker was in power over me and my mother, not even when I was seeking my mother up and down the canal and the Lakes, not even when I found that she had gone away on her last long journey that bleak winter day in Madison.  I now devoted myself to the memory