I have to hear them so often. All through that desperate brain fever I had, they jangled and pealed through my head; bells, bells, bells, that almost rang me out of this world and into the next.
I take my hands away from my ears; shall I not have to listen to the sound through all the years of my life? and think to myself how like wedding bells they sound. There is a mad, exulting hurry in their peal, as though they could not utter themselves for joy, and yet no one is likely to be married at four of the clock in the afternoon. Poe's weird verses always come into my mind when I listen to bells. I wonder could any other man have caught their meaning so perfectly, and written it down so faithfully? That is a great gift to have not only a beautiful idea but to clothe it in the right words.
As I listen, my thoughts go back to that day, just three years ago, when I looked in the glass and saw my hair just beginning to grow in short thick locks over my head; it has almost all come back to me now, but it is not so long as it used to be. When I began to get about, I made up a chignon out of all that had been cut off, and used to put it on over my short curls, but I was always losing it, and at last Pepper found it and worried it to bits, and there was an end of my first unlawful adornment. I wonder if I look that popular object of ridicule, a blighted being, as I sit under the oak tree in my smart print gown, with all the flowers creeping about my feet and the bonny blue sky over my head. I pull back my sleeve and look at my arm; it is not very fat, but it is not lean, and my fingers have dimples in them still—decidedly, grief has not altogether made a wreck and a ruin of me. That is the beauty of never having been particularly handsome; when there is so little to lose, the difference is not perceptible.
Dolly says that if I had more colour I should look exactly as I did three years ago, and I believe that she and mother both think that I am beginning to get over it. Well, I live, it is true, and
