I
They thought she had forgotten, because she never mentioned anything of
that, never asked a question. But she hadn’t. No! She remembered, and at
her worst and loneliest, she longed for the old times. Besides, she had
three times heard Miss Amy relating the story when they believed her to
be asleep in bed, and each time she had heard it told, the most
immeasurable bitterness, the most devastating misery had rushed over
her.
“Why ever was I _born_?” she used to cry to herself.
And hadn’t she also heard Miss Amy murmur, not imagining herself
overheard, that: You can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear! What
else can you expect from a girl like _that_?
It had hurt and angered her so; it had left her without gratitude,
without even justice. She quite hated Miss Amy.
Lying in her bed that night all these feelings flamed in her with
fiercest intensity, shame, bitterness, and, above all, a great and
unassuaged grief for that incomparable friend whom she had lost, for the
kind and sturdy Miss Julie, dead these five long years.
Miss Julie had meant to do a kindness. She intended--and if she had
lived she would have succeeded in--benefiting Rosaleen.
“I remember it as if it were yesterday,” Miss Amy had begun her
thrice-told tale, “The day that Julie brought her here....”
Well, and didn’t Rosaleen remember it, too? Who better?