Bab: A Sub-Deb Read Free Page A

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----"
    "Now, Barbara, I am not going to have any nonsense. You must put that man out of your head."
    "Man? What man?"
    "You think you are in love with some drivelling young Fool. I'm not blind, or an idot. And I won't have it."
    "I have not said that there is anyone, have I?" I said in a gentle voice. "But if there was, just what would you propose to do, mother?"
    "If you were three years younger I'd propose to spank you." Then I think she saw that she was taking the wrong method, for she changed her Tactics. "It's the fault of that Silly School," she said. (Note: These are my mother's words, not mine.) "They are hotbeds of sickley sentamentality. They----"
    And just then the violets came, addressed to me. Mother opened them herself, her mouth set. "My love is like a white, white rose," she said. "Barbara, do you know who sent these?"
    "Yes, mother," I said meekly. This was quite true. I did.
    I am indeed sorry to record that here my mother lost her temper, and there was no end of a fuss. It ended by mother offering me a string of seed pearls for Christmas, and my party dresses cut V front and back, if I would, as she phrazed it, "put him out of my silly head."
    "I shall have to write one letter, mother," I said, "to--to break things off. I cannot tear myself out of another's Life