There is one exercise here on page twenty that I hate worst of all.  You screw up your face tight until you look like a Christmas mask to get your neck muscles taut and then wobble your head around like a new-born baby until it swims.  I did that one twenty extra times and all the others in proportion to make up for those two hours in bed.  Hereafter I’ll get up at the time directed on page three, or maybe earlier.  It frightens me to think that I’ve got only a few weeks more to turn from a cabbage-rose into a lily.  I won’t let myself even think “luscious peach” and “string-bean.”  If I do, I get warm and happy all over and let up on myself.  I try when I get hungry to think of myself in that blue muslin dress.

I haven’t been really willing before to write down in this torture volume that I took that garment to the city with me and what Madam Rene did to it—­made it over into the loveliest thing I ever saw, only I wouldn’t let her alter the size one single inch.  I’m honorable as all women are at peculiar times.  I think she understood, but she seemed not to, and worked a miracle on it with ribbon and lace.  I’ve put it away on the top shelf of a closet, for it is torment to look at it.

You can just take any old recipe for a party and mix up a debut for a girl, but it takes more time to concoct one for a widow, especially if it is for yourself.  I spent all the rest of the day doing almost nothing and thinking until I felt lightheaded.  Finally I had just about given up any idea of a blaze and had decided to leak out in general society as quietly as my clothes would let me, when a real conflagration was lighted inside me.

If Tom Pollard wasn’t my own first cousin I would have loved him desperately, even if I am a week older than he.  He was about the only oasis in my marriage mirage, though I don’t think anybody would think of calling him at all green.  He never stopped coming to see me occasionally, and Mr. Carter liked him.  He was the first man to notice the white ruche I sewed in the neck of my old black taffeta four or five months ago and he let me see that he noticed it out of the corner of his eyes even right there in church, under Aunt Adeline’s very elbow.  He makes love unconsciously and he flirts with his own mother.  As soon as I’ve made this widowhood hurdle—­well, I’m going to spend a lot of time buying tobacco with him in his Hup runabout, which sounds as if it was named for himself.

And when that conflagration was lighted in me about my debut, Tom did it.  I was sitting peaceably on my own front steps, dressed in the summer-before-last that Judy washes and irons every day while I’m deciding how to hand out the first sip of my trousseau to the neighbors, when Tom, in a dangerous blue-striped shirt, with a tie that melted into it in tone, blew over my hedge and landed at my side.  He kissed the lace ruffle on my sleeve while I reproved him severely and settled down to enjoy him.  But I didn’t have such an awfully good time as I generally do with him.  He was too full of another woman, and even a first cousin can be an exasperation in that condition.