I ought to have known it was something else!  And I have been wondering, ever since I read the letters and found out about the accident to Billy’s eyes, when he came near being shot and the powder got in them and nearly put them out, why it is that people are so mistrusting and why we let one thing we can’t understand make us forget what we ought to understand very well.  Ten thousand kind things, right things, nice things we take for granted, and then at the first thing we think isn’t kind or right or nice we forget the others and howl and snort about the one we do not like.  At least that is what I did.  Not outwardly, of course, but inwardly, for I’m pretty toplofty about being treated right, and I flare out and say things I shouldn’t at times, and afterward I am so ashamed of myself that a worm of the dust is a perky animal to me for a few minutes.  That condition of mind doesn’t last very long, however.  I am not by nature a humble-minded person.  While it does last it is awful.  Perfectly awful.

When I read Billy’s letter I laid right down on the grass and put my face deep down in it, and there wasn’t anything abominable that anybody could have said about me that I would not have agreed to.  All the time I had been furious with him for not writing as usual, he had been shut up in a dark room, not able to see the food he was eating, much less able to write letters, and then when they took the bandages off he wrote so much they had to be put back again, and he was forbidden to write more than a few lines, which accounted for so many cards.  He wouldn’t let any one else write me, and I don’t understand exactly how it happened except he saw a drunken man on the street waving a pistol, and there were some children around, and before the policeman could get to him Billy had caught his hand and the thing had gone off and some of the powder got in his eyes.  He made light of it, but I know exactly what he did.  I thought it was a Western product that was engrossing him, and it was the children he was trying to save.  Oh, Billy, I’m a pig!  A perfectly horrid pig!

And then I suddenly thought of the astonishing letter I had written about being in love and maybe engaged, and I prayed hard that he would never get it; but I knew it was too late for prayers.  And then I got mad with Pat for writing to Jess about the girl from the West, and with Jess for writing what Pat had written, and not for some time did I come to my senses and realize I was the only person I had any right to get mad with.  I got, all right.  And then I wondered what to do.  Billy said they would sail on the 21st and reach New York on the 29th, so I decided to go back to Rose Hill and begin to pack.