“Would Bles care if I told?” she asked doubtfully.
“No,” Miss Smith ventured.
And then the girl crouched at her feet and told the dream and the story. Many factors were involved that were quite foreign to the older woman’s nature and training. The recital brought to her New England mind many questions of policy and propriety. And yet, as she looked down upon the dark face, hot with enthusiasm, it all seemed somehow more than right. Slowly and lightly Miss Smith slipped her arm about Zora, and nodded and smiled a perfect understanding. They looked out together into the darkening twilight.
“It is so late and wet and you’re tired tonight—don’t you think you’d better sleep in your little room?”
Zora sat still. She thought of the noisy flaming cabin and the dark swamp; but a contrasting thought of the white bed made her timid, and slowly she shook her head. Nevertheless Miss Smith led her to the room.
“Here are things for you to wear,” she pointed out, opening the bureau, “and here is the bathroom.” She left the girl standing in the middle of the floor.
In time Zora came to stay often at Miss Smith’s cottage, and to learn new and unknown ways of living and dressing. She still refused to board, for that would cost more than she could pay yet, and she would accept no charity. Gradually an undemonstrative friendship sprang up between the pale old gray-haired teacher and the dark young black-haired girl. Delicately, too, but gradually, the companionship of Bles and Zora was guided and regulated. Of mornings Zora would hurry through her lessons and get excused to fly to the swamp, to work and dream alone. At noon Bles would run down, and they would linger until he must hurry back to dinner. After school he would go again, working while she was busy in Miss Smith’s office, and returning later, would linger awhile to tell Zora of his day while she busied herself with her little tasks. Saturday mornings they would go to the swamp and work together, and sometimes Miss Smith, stealing away from curious eyes, would come and sit and talk with them as they toiled.
In those days, for these two souls, earth came very near to heaven. Both were in the midst of that mighty change from youth to womanhood and manhood. Their manner toward each other by degrees grew shyer and more thoughtful. There was less of comradeship, but the little meant more. The rough good fellowship was silently put aside; they no longer lightly clasped hands; and each at times wondered, in painful self-consciousness, if the other cared.
Then began, too, that long and subtle change wherein a soul, until now unmindful of its wrappings, comes suddenly to consciousness of body and clothes; when it gropes and tries to adjust one with the other, and through them to give to the inner deeper self, finer and fuller expression. One saw it easily, almost suddenly, in Alwyn’s Sunday suit, vivid neckties, and awkward fads.
Slower, subtler, but more striking was the change in Zora, as she began to earn bits of pin money in the office and to learn to sew. Dresses hung straighter; belts served a better purpose; stockings were smoother; underwear was daintier. Then her hair—that great dark mass of immovable infinitely curled hair—began to be subdued and twisted and combed until, with steady pains and study, it lay in thick twisted braids about her velvet forehead, like some shadowed halo. All this came much more slowly and spasmodically than one tells it. Few noticed the change much; none noticed all; and yet there came a night—a student’s social—when with a certain suddenness the whole school, teachers and pupils, realized the newness of the girl, and even Bles was startled.
He had bought her in town, at Christmas time, a pair of white satin slippers, partly to test the smallness of her feet on which in younger days he had rallied her, and partly because she had mentioned a possible white dress. They were a cheap, plain pair but dainty, and they fitted well.
When the evening came and the students were marching and the teachers, save Miss Smith, were sitting rather primly apart and commenting, she entered the room. She was a little late, and a hush greeted her. One boy, with the inimitable drawl of the race, pushed back his ice-cream and addressed it with a mournful head-shake:
“Go ’way, honey, yo’ los’ yo’ tas’e!”
The dress was plain and fitted every curving of a healthy girlish form. She paused a moment white-bodied and white-limbed but dark and velvet-armed, her full neck and oval head rising rich and almost black above, with its deep-lighted eyes and crown of silent darkling hair.
To some, such a revelation of grace and womanliness in this hoyden, the gentle swelling of lankness to beauty, of lowliness to shy self-poise, was a sudden joy, to others a mere blindness. Mary Taylor was perplexed and in some indefinite way amazed; and many of the other teachers saw no beauty, only a strangeness that brought a smile. They were such as know beauty by convention only, and find it lip-ringed, hoop-skirted, tattooed, or corsetted, as time and place decree.
The change in Zora, however, had been neither cataclysmic nor revolutionary and it was yet far—very far—from complete. She still ran and romped in the woods, and dreamed her dreams; she still was passionately independent and “queer.” Tendencies merely had become manifest, some dominant. She would, unhindered, develop to a brilliant, sumptuous womanhood; proud, conquering, full-blooded, and deep bosomed—a passionate mother of men. Herein lay all her early wildness and strangeness. Herein lay, as yet half hidden, dimly sensed and all unspoken, the power of a mighty all-compelling love for one human soul, and, through it, for all the souls of men. All this lay growing and developing; but as yet she was still a girl, with a
