And, as a normal two-and-a-half does not require many weeks to regain lost baby plumpness and pink cheeks, soon Elizabeth Ann was opening sparkling eyes in the morning and closing play-tired ones at night. Elizabeth and I would stand over her crib. We needed not the spoken word to read the great relief and gratitude in each other's eyes.
When I was a child, even before I had reached the age of ten, my flights of imagination in picturing my future self always took one of two directions—toward being an actress or a writer. It was said of my mother that she possessed considerable dramatic ability when she was a girl, and I know my father wrote extremely well. Neither mother nor father realized the glories of these talents developed, except in amateur, local settings. Doubtless, mother's Quaker grandmother, with whom she lived a great deal of the time, would have thrown up her hands in holy horror at the mere mention of a stage career for her granddaughter, Mary Lee Williams. So this love of the drama took with my mother an entirely safe form, and she became known among her friends and the townspeople as a monologuist of more than usual ability.
I am frank to say that the dramatic appeal of my own life-play, which had passed the climactic stage with Elizabeth Ann's entrance into the world, greatly appeased the instinctive hunger for self-expression which I likely inherited from my mother, and indeed I was finding the drama in which I held the center of the stage to be fast developing into a tragedy. A tragedy because it was failing—yea, had failed—to provide the satisfying denouement which I had looked forward to with hopeful heart at the rise of the curtain. This sense of unfinishment had begun to prey upon my mind even before our baby came, but I had banished it rather successfully with the full buoyancy of my nature and had clung to visionary hopes and to Mr. Harding's oft-repeated state-
