Then one day they all rode over to eat supper on Clear Creek and went swimming by moonlight in the deep hole there was under the bluff. Daughter got a crazy streak in her after a while and ran up and said she was going to dive from the edge of the bluff. The water looked so good and the moon floated shivering on top. They all yelled at her not to do it but she made a dandy dive right from the edge. But something was the matter. She’d hit her head, it hurt terribly. She was swallowing water, she was fighting a great weight that was pressing down on her, that was Joe. The moonlight flowed out in a swirl leaving it all black, only she had her arms around Joe’s neck, her fingers were tightening around the ribbed muscles of his arms. She came to with his face looking into hers and the moon up in the sky again and warm stuff pouring over her forehead. She was trying to say, “Joe, I wanto, Joe, I wanto,” but it all drained away into warm sticky black again, only she caught his voice deep, deep…“pretty near had me drowned too…” and Dad sharp and angry like in court, “I told her she oughtn’t to dive off there.”
She came to herself again in bed with her head hurting horribly and Dr. Winslow there, and the first thing she thought was where was Joe and had she acted like a little silly telling him she was crazy about him? But nobody said anything about it and they were all awful nice to her except that Dad came, still talking with his angry courtroom voice, and lectured her for being foolhardy and a tomboy and having almost cost Joe his life by the stranglehold she had on him when they’d pulled them both out of the water. She had a fractured skull and had to be in bed all summer and Joe was awful nice though he looked at her kinder funny out of his sharp black eyes the first time he came in her room. As long as he stayed on the ranch he came to read to her after lunch. He read her all of Lorna Doone and half of Nicholas Nickleby and she lay there in bed, hot and cosy in her fever, feeling the rumble of his deep voice through the pain in her head and fighting all the time inside not to cry out like a little silly that she was crazy about him and why didn’t he like her just a little bit. When he’d gone it wasn’t any fun being sick any more. Dad or Bud came and read to her sometimes but most of the time she liked better reading to herself. She read all of Dickens, Lorna Doone twice, and Poole’s The Harbor, that made her want to go to New York.
Next fall Dad took her north for a year in a finishing school in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. She was excited on the trip up on the train and loved every minute of it, but Miss Tynge’s was horrid and the girls were all northern girls and so mean and made fun of her clothes and talked about nothing but Newport, and Southampton, and matinée idols she’d never seen; she hated it. She cried every night after she’d gone to bed thinking how she hated the school and how Joe Washburn would never like her now. When Christmas vacation came and she had to stay on with the two Miss Tynges and some of the teachers who lived too far away to go home either, she just decided she wouldn’t stand it any longer and one morning before anybody was up she got out of the house, walked down to the station, bought herself a ticket to Washington, and got on the first westbound train with nothing but a toothbrush and a nightgown in her handbag. She was scared all alone on the train at first but such a nice young Virginian who was a West Point Cadet got on at Havre de Grace where she had to change; they had the time of their lives together laughing and talking. In Washington he asked permission to be her escort in the nicest way and took her all around, to see the Capitol and the White House and the Smithsonian Institute and set her up to lunch at the New Willard and put her on the train for St. Louis that night. His name was Paul English. She promised she’d write him every day of her life. She was so excited she couldn’t sleep lying in her berth looking out of the window of the pullman at the trees and the circling hills all in the faint glow of snow and now and then lights speeding by; she could remember exactly how he looked and how his hair was parted and the long confident grip of his hand when they said goodby. She’d been a little nervous at first, but they’d been like old friends right from the beginning and he’d been so courteous and gentlemanly. He’d been her first pickup.
When she walked in on Dad and the boys at breakfast a sunny winter morning two days later, my, weren’t they surprised; Dad tried to scold her, but Daughter could see that he was as pleased as she was. Anyway, she didn’t care, it was so good to be home.
After Christmas she and Dad and the boys went for a week’s hunting down near Corpus Christi and had the time of their lives and Daughter shot her first deer. When they got back to Dallas Daughter said she wasn’t going back to be finished but that what she would like to do was go up to New York to stay with Ada Washburn, who was studying at Columbia, and to take courses where she’d really learn something. Ada was Joe Washburn’s sister, an old maid but bright as a dollar and was working for her Ph.D in Education. It took a lot of arguing because Dad had set his heart on having Daughter go to a finishing school but she finally convinced him and was off again to New York.
She was reading Les Misérables all the way up on the train and looking out at the greyishbrownish winter landscape that didn’t seem to have any life to it after she left the broad hills of Texas, pale green with winter wheat and alfalfa, feeling more and more excited and scared as hour by hour she got nearer New York. There was a stout motherly woman who’d lost her husband who got on the train at Little Rock and wouldn’t stop talking about the dangers and pitfalls that beset a young woman’s path in big cities. She kept such a strict watch on Daughter that she never got a chance to talk to the interesting looking young man with the intense black eyes who boarded the train at St. Louis and kept going over papers of some kind he had in a brown briefcase. She thought he looked a little like Joe Washburn. At last when they were crossing New Jersey and there got to be more and more factories and grimy industrial towns, Daughter’s heart got to beating so fast she couldn’t sit still but kept having to go out and stamp around in the cold raw air of the vestibule. The fat greyheaded conductor asked her with a teasing laugh if her beau was going to be down at the station to meet her, she seemed so anxious to get in. They were going through Newark then. Only one more stop. The sky was lead color over wet streets full of automobiles and a drizzly rain was pitting the patches of snow with grey. The train began to cross wide desolate saltmarshes, here and there broken by an uneven group of factory structures or a black river with steamboats on it. There didn’t seem to be any people; it looked so cold over those marshes Daughter felt scared and lonely just looking at them and wished she was home. Then suddenly the train was in a tunnel, and the porter was piling all the bags in the front end of the car. She got into the fur coat Dad had bought her as a Christmas present and pulled her gloves on over her hands cold with excitement for fear that maybe Ada Washburn hadn’t gotten her telegram or hadn’t been able to come down to meet her.
But there she was on the platform in noseglasses and raincoat looking as oldmaidish as ever and a slightly younger girl with her who turned out to be from Waco and studying art. They had a long ride in a taxi up crowded streets full of slush with yellow and grey snowpiles along the sidewalks. “If you’d have been here a week ago, Anne Elizabeth, I declare you’d have seen a real blizzard.”
“I used to think snow was like on Christmas cards,” said Esther Wilson who was an interestinglooking girl with black eyes and a long face and a deep kind of tragicsounding voice. “But it was just an illusion like a lot of things.” “New York’s no place for illusions,” said Ada sharply. “It all looks kinder like a illusion to me,” said Daughter, looking out of the window of the taxicab.