Mother and Sis slept late the next morning, and I went out stealthily and did some shopping.  First I bought myself a bunch of violets, with a white rose in the center, and I printed on the card: 

“My love is like a white, white rose.  H.”  And sent it to myself.

It was deception, I acknowledge, but having put my hand to the Plow, I did not intend to steer a crooked course.  I would go straight to the end.  I am like that in everything I do.  But, on delibarating things over, I felt that Violets, alone and unsuported, were not enough.  I felt that If I had a photograph, it would make everything more real.  After all, what is a love affair without a picture of the Beloved Object?

So I bought a photograph.  It was hard to find what I wanted, but I got it at last in a stationer’s shop, a young man in a checked suit with a small mustache—­the young man, of course, not the suit.  Unluckaly, he was rather blonde, and had a dimple in his chin.  But he looked exactly as though his name ought to be Harold.

I may say here that I chose “Harold,” not because it is a favorite name of mine, but because it is romantic in sound.  Also because I had never known any one named Harold and it seemed only discrete.

I took it home in my muff and put it under my pillow where Hannah would find it and probably take it to mother.  I wanted to buy a ring too, to hang on a ribbon around my neck.  But the violets had made a fearful hole in my thirteen dollars.

I borrowed a stub pen at the stationer’s and I wrote on the photograph, in large, sprawling letters, “To you from me.”

“There,” I said to myself, when I put it under the pillow.  “You look like a photograph, but you are really a bomb-shell.”

As things eventuated, it was.  More so, indeed.

Mother sent for me when I came in.  She was sitting in front of her mirror, having the vibrater used on her hair, and her manner was changed.  I guessed that there had been a family Counsel over the poem, and that they had decided to try kindness.

“Sit down, Barbara,” she said.  “I hope you were not lonely last night?”

“I am never lonely, mother.  I always have things to think about.”

I said this in a very pathetic tone.

“What sort of things?” mother asked, rather sharply.

“Oh—­things,” I said vaguely.  “Life is such a mess, isn’t it?”

“Certainly not.  Unless one makes it so.”

“But it is so difficult.  Things come up and—­and it’s hard to know what to do.  The only way, I suppose, is to be true to one’s beleif in one’s self.”

“Take that thing off my head and go out, Hannah,” mother snapped.  “Now then, Barbara, what in the world has come over you?”

“Over me?  Nothing.”

“You are being a silly child.”

“I am no longer a child, mother.  I am seventeen.  And at seventeen there are problems.  After all, one’s life is one’s own.  One must decide——­”