Monrepos, January 28.

Carin, darling:

Thank you for all your letters. You are very good to me. No matter how careless I am about writing, you never forget, you dear! And now I think I am to send you congratulations because you are engaged to that fine Vance GrÉvy. Truly, I think him one of the most interesting young men I have ever known. Moreover, he looks good, and true, and firm and enduring. Oh, little Carin, my own yellow-headed one, be very happy with him! I send you a thousand kisses and ten thousand good wishes, and I want you to know that if ever, ever I can do anything for you, I want to be allowed to do it. Please find something for me to do. You must not be so happy that you will forget me. I have always known there was a jealous streak in my disposition, and I am feeling it right now.You say you have your ring? Your engagement ring! It’s not like other engagement rings? How nice! A pink pearl. Well, pearls suit you just as they do your darling mother.

I am so glad that she and your father like your Vance. Oh, fortunate girl! Always beautiful things happen to you. That, of course, is just as it ought to be. I hope they will keep right on happening to you all through life.

But, once more, in your happiness, do not forget your Azalea. For she is not very happy. No, though now she has much money and some friends—you, always, and Barbara and Annie Laurie, not to mention others—yet she is sad. Things are wrong—quite wrong.

I told you I was coming over here to visit Miss Delight Ravanel at her quaint old home, which she calls “Monrepos.” Aunt Lorena was quite willing I should come. She and I had a frank talk together, and now I understand many things that I did not before.

“I am going to ask you, Aunt Lorena,” I said to her, “if you truly like me. You mustn’t be polite, please, because that would not help me at all. You asked me to come here, and I came, and you have been very kind, and I have done the best I could. But lately there has been a change. You—you have not looked at me quite the way you used. Or at any rate, the understanding between us is not perfect. So let us speak out and say what we really think.”

A silly woman would have been disagreeable, probably, at having a young girl speak this way, but Aunt Lorena is not silly, and she is not disagreeable.

“Azalea,” she said quietly, “I truly like you. I am, indeed, happily surprised in you. I like you better as a house companion than I thought I could like any woman. For, to tell the truth, I am not a social person. If I have not looked at you in quite the old way, it is because I feel conscious of the complications that have arisen. I do not believe, Azalea, in trying to influence the life of another in the way that your grandmother has tried to influence your life. It is not right. I believe that everyone should be free in this world, so far as possible, and your grandmother has taken your freedom away from you.”“Yes,” I said, “she has. But she meant to be wise and kind for me. I loved her, Aunt Lorena, and I always shall.”

“Are you willing to abide by the terms of her will? Are you willing to marry the man your uncle approves of—the man who will, according to your grandmother’s idea, bring credit to the family?”

She looked so intense and sympathetic that I couldn’t help laughing.

“I am willing to marry just one man,” I found courage to say. “I hope uncle will approve of him.”

“If you mean Keefe O’Connor,” she said in her high voice, “you will see that your hopes are not realized. Your uncle likes him very much personally, but your grandmother did not. Or at least, she did not approve of having him enter the Knox family. It was to keep him from doing so that she made her will as she did. She told your uncle that.”

Carin, was it very bad of me to laugh again. “Then,” I said, “I shall have to let the fortune go, Aunt Lorena.”

She lifted both of her thin white hands in warning.“That is very easy for you to say, my dear, very easy indeed. You are young and do not know the value of money and of position and of an estate like this. It is the feeling that you do not realize these things, that made it necessary for your uncle and myself to ask Mr. O’Connor to—to absent himself—until you have had time to make up your mind. We want you to travel and to see the world. We want you to meet people and to have a chance to compare this one with that. But when we insist upon all this, it may seem to you as if we were opposing you and setting ourselves against your happiness, whereas, above everything else, we want to do what is for your best interest.”

She looked more solemn than ever.

“You are going against your own heart, Auntie,” I told her. “It is that which makes you seem so changed. Oh, don’t think about it at all. Just treat me the way you did at first. Love me, love me! Somehow, the other matter will straighten itself out. We have troubles enough without bringing any on ourselves.”

But she wouldn’t take the matter lightly. She seemed very much depressed. Uncle was very sad, too, partly on account of the loss of his mother, partly because he was made to act the part of a ‘stern guardian,’ when it is not in keeping with his nature. I feel sure he tried to dissuade grandmother from doing what she did, but he did not succeed. I think, myself, that if people at Mallowbanks had more to do they would be a great deal happier.

Well, anyway, I kept my promise to my nice twenty-seventh cousin, Miss Ravanel, and came away over to her, and was put in a quaint, bare, sunny room, and here I have been for almost a week. My chocolate is sent up to my bed in the morning; Miss Ravanel does not appear until ten. Then we meet in the morning room and she embroiders while I read “Lorna Doone” to her. She has been in England in the Lorna Doone country, and she interrupts the reading to tell me about what she has seen. It is very interesting. But, Oh, Carin, it is as if I were listening to something afar off, and as if the bright fire burning in the grate, the pale sunshine on the pines, the little room with its fantastic chintz, were all a dream.

It does not seem real at all to me. Is it because I am always thinking of something else?Did I do well, Carin, to give up my life with Mother McBirney, my little busy, useful, struggling life, and to come here among my relatives, who are, after all, strangers? Yes, yes, I know that for a time I felt at ease with them, that to be among my own people brought me great delight. But now, suddenly, I seem useless and stripped of all that made life rich.

* * * * * * * * *

Carin, I have just been reading this over, and I never read anything more dismal. You remember that song of Jean Ingelow’s where the dove sat on the mast and mourned and mourned and mourned. Well, I sound precisely like that ridiculous dove.

I know if you were here you would give me a piece of your mind. So would Keefe. So would Annie Laurie. Actually I am glad none of you is here. Mercy me, how you would scold me!

It has occurred to me during the last minute and a half that I haven’t been treating my tremendously nice little hostess very well. And how good she has been to me!

I am going to reform. I shall ask her if she’ll not go walking—she loves to walk—and I shall suggest visiting old Mrs. Treadway, whom Miss Ravanel likes to look after.

Carin, forgive me for being such a dolorous creature. And you so happy, too! I wanted to do something for you, and I go and throw cold water on your sparkling day with a sighing, moaning letter. Shame on me.

I love you,

Azalea.

Monrepos, February 1st.

Carin girl:

So you are to be at Lee for the spring vacation. What fun! Of course I shall try to get there. I feel as if I must see you. And do you really mean to tell me that you want me to go to Europe with you, Carin? How wonderful that would be. But I couldn’t, could I? If I go at all I must go with Uncle David and Aunt Lorena. So that’s settled.

What do you think Miss Ravanel and I have been doing? Making dresses. She needed some and there didn’t seem to be anybody at hand to make them, and so I said to please let me try. At first she thought I would make a botch of them. But not at all. Mother McBirney taught me to be very particular, and I have a sort of a “touch” as you and Annie Laurie always said. The dresses, which are for spring, are really very nice. She said she never had any that really suited her so well.

While we sewed, she told me many things about her life. I was quite right; she did love my Uncle David when she was a girl and he was a young man, but when Aunt Lorena came back from boarding school, he fell terribly in love with her and went to Miss Ravanel and told her, and she bade him do whatever his heart prompted.

“You’re not going to hate me, are you, Delight?” he asked her.

“Hate you?” she said. “Why should I hate you? I want you to be very happy and mean to be happy myself.”

“You will marry someone much more worthy of you than I am,” he assured her. She said that was as might be. She hoped she would love someone again. But she never did, Carin. All of her life she has had to see her kin leaving her, either to go to some other part of the country, or into the family vault, and never once has she met anyone she could care for. But she says she has been quite happy after all.

“I love life,” she told me. “I like to watch the seasons roll around, and I enjoy each one as it comes. I am never tired of walking about my woods and my garden, and it amuses me to care for my old house. I enjoy my books, my music and my thoughts. Sometimes I am glad that I never married. I have fallen into very quiet ways, and it would disturb me to have anyone about, except someone like yourself, Azalea.”

When I see her, so shy and dainty and content, going about her little duties and hospitalities, I am glad, too, that she did not marry. She is like a little domestic nun. I like her the way she is.

Uncle and Aunt Lorena called this morning to ask me when I was coming home, and I told them I would come any time they liked, and they wanted me to go with them at once, but Miss Ravanel begged that I might stay over one Sunday more. She wants to teach me to make Washington pie, and we both want to finish “Lorna Doone.” So I am staying. I’m much happier. This is just a line to tell you.

Your own

Azalea.

Mallowbanks, February 10.

Dearest Carin:

We are getting ready to go to England. Aunt Lorena is having a charming outfit made for me. Now that she and I really understand each other, we are getting along together beautifully. You see, she is a frank, straight-forward, fair-minded woman and she couldn’t enjoy herself while she thought I was not being fairly treated. But now that I know everything, and that she sees I have the courage to make my choice, she feels better about it all.

I wish you could see my new clothes. They are delightful, and so becoming! They are very practical too. We are not going to take quantities of things, because it would only bother us. But I have my traveling suit of Scotch cloth in a small blue and green plaid, and a hat of blue silk braid trimmed with green, and a steamer rug and coat that look well with it; and then two little silks for dinner, nights when we are stopping at any rather fashionable places—one of old rose, and the other of dove color. The pink will be for gay moods, the dove color for pensive ones. Then there is my street suit of tan with shoes and gloves to suit, and the cleverest hat you ever saw, with two big tawny chrysanthemums on it. I don’t seem to be very good at describing clothes, but really, as I said at the beginning, these things are charming.

Then to think of seeing England! Me, Azalea! I don’t believe it. I cannot bring myself to see that it can possibly be true.

Carin, that reminds me: Why don’t you ask Annie Laurie to go abroad with you? Do you know, I think she would do it. I remember hearing your mother say to her, years and years ago, that some day she and Annie Laurie would be together in Europe, listening to great music. And why not? Annie Laurie could easily afford it. Sam Disbrow is through with school now, and he could look after Annie Laurie’s dairy. Propose it, do. Perhaps we could all meet over there.

I must run down to see Mother McBirney before I go. Father McBirney is almost well and hopes to reach home in March to do the plowing. He will get someone to help him of course, for Jim is to stay on at school. I have placed a certain sum in the bank for Jim—enough to last him till he has graduated if he is careful. And Jim is careful. I made up my mind that whatever happened, I was going to see that Jim got what he wanted in the way of an education. He really is wonderfully bright and learns so fast that I don’t see how he can remember all that he crams into his head.

Keefe doesn’t write. That was a part of the bargain that he made with Uncle David—that he was not to write.

But I write to him.

Is that terribly bold?

But you wouldn’t think so if you could see the letters. Anyway, sometimes they aren’t letters. They are just envelopes with little poems in them that I find in the magazines or newspapers and the like. Of course, sometimes I write a poem, too. About daffodils, you know, or sunsets, or rainy days. Never anything sentimental. Not at all. Or personal. I wouldn’t be personal. I merely remind Keefe that I am alive. A couple of violets in a blank sheet of paper will do that nicely. Aunt Lorena knows. She doesn’t approve. Not quite, that is. She says it is foolish. So since then I’ve only been sending little drawings—pictures of people who call, and one of the GrÉvy’s parrot, and another of some geese I saw flying north. They are such bad drawings that they are quite sure to annoy Keefe. I pointed out their badness to Aunt Lorena.

“Wouldn’t it be a good idea to annoy him?” I asked. “Now just look at this sketch of a cat which I mean to send him. That cat will make him furious. I tried to foreshorten it, but I seem to have performed a surgical operation on it instead.”

“He’ll have you arrested for cruelty to animals,” she agreed. “But really, Azalea, I wish you would keep perfectly silent. This young man does not write to you. Are you doing what is dignified?”

“Aunt Lorena,” I said, shaking my finger at her, “my own private opinion is that he is writing to me every night of his life, and filing the letters away for future reference.”Aunt Lorena lifted her eyebrows very, very high. I smiled.

“What are you laughing at, Azalea?” she asked sharply.

“At your Gothic eyebrows, dearest Auntie,” I said. Then I kissed her.

“Don’t ask me to be too dignified,” I begged. “I’m only Azalea.”

“Azalea Knox is a very pleasing and interesting young woman of a good deal of importance in the world, if she would only realize it,” she said.

I looked at her a moment.

“She’s not so very, very happy,” I said. The tears came in her eyes, and her eyebrows were not pointed at all. Really, Aunt Lorena is a dear. You just have to break through her crust. The only trouble is that the crust grows over, and you have to keep breaking through. It makes you feel a little like an Eskimo, fishing.

“I am truly sorry,” she said. “But I think if she is a really obedient and patient girl that some day she will be very happy, and that she will thank the friends who now seem to her to be afflicting her.”

We didn’t say anything for a few minutes.Then I ventured:

“Then you really think I ought not to send anything to Keefe? Not even this terrible drawing of a cat? Not even to make him laugh and—and hold me in contempt?”

She laughed at that.

“Not for any reason at all,” she said.

“Then, Aunt Lorena, let me send word just once more—only once. It will be the end.”

“The end?”

“I will never direct another envelope of any sort to him till he writes to me. If he has given his word, he will not do that until—”

“Until?” Her eyebrows were Gothic arches again.

“Until we find, beyond all question, that we cannot live apart.”

“Piffle,” she said. “One can live without anyone. It is a mere question of making up one’s mind.”

I sent Keefe the terrible little picture of the cat.

“Keefe,” I wrote him, “please excuse me for being a bold-faced minx. I must be one, or I wouldn’t have sent you poems and violets and things. Kindly observe this drawing of a cat. It is a cat, I don’t care what you say. She looks as I feel, somewhat cramped. But she is a good cat, and I am a good, obedient girl. I shall waste no more stamps on you. I am going to England, and I am commanded to be very happy. So, since I am obedient, pray think of me as being not only happy but gay.”

I signed my name to it—just “Azalea”—and sent it off. Now I shall write no more.

Farewell,

Azalea.

P.S. I wish you could see my traveling veil. It looks like a peacock’s breast. Clothes are nice, aren’t they? I never realized before how nice they are.