Why,
the idea! Did she want me to dress like a little frump of a country
girl? It seems she did.
Poor mother! Dear mother! I wonder how she kept her patience at all.
But she kept it. I remember that distinctly, too.
It was that winter that I went through the morbid period. Like our
childhood's measles and whooping cough, it seems to come to most of
us--us women children. I wonder why? Certainly it came to me. True to
type I cried by the hour over fancied slights from my schoolmates, and
brooded days at a time because Father or Mother "didn't understand," I
questioned everything in the earth beneath and the heavens above;
and in my dark despair over an averted glance from my most intimate
friend, I meditated on whether life was, or was not, worth the living,
with a preponderance toward the latter.
Being plunged into a state of settled gloom, I then became acutely
anxious as to my soul's salvation, and feverishly pursued every ism
and ology that caught my roving eye's attention, until in one short
month I had become, in despairing rotation, an incipient agnostic,
atheist, pantheist, and monist. Meanwhile I read Ibsen, and wisely
discussed the new school of domestic relationships.
Mother--dear mother!--looked on aghast.
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