JOHNTOWN, TENN.
~19
into the dark hall. "Remember about libel suits!" Celia Hornby
called gaily after her.
Celia Hornby went upstairs to her room. She was terribly ex–
cited with herself, for being the way she was, the new way she had
never expected. It was like getting a present. She looked in the
mirror at her still flushed cheeks and brightened eyes, and said,
"Gosh," in a kind of awe, "Gosh, Celia Hornby," she repeated, peer–
ing more closely at the face in the mirror, and she was a little ap–
palled, and afraid, too. And she was sorry, a little, about Miss
Abernathy. In a kind of muted way, carefully getting out of range
of the mirror, she got undressed, and into her nightgown. She didn't
want to brush her teeth, or comb her hair. She liked the faint sense
of escape, rebellion, untidiness, frowsiness. But she came back to the
mirror and looked at herself standing there in her nightgown. She
wanted to lift up her nightgown and see her whole self, as she might
be seen. But that didn't seem decent. She thought that might, some–
how, be really shameful.
So she got into bed, still in that strange muted way, which was
really, she knew, just another kind of excitement. She lay in the
dark and thought that she didn't care what Mr. Harrick might do
to her. She didn't care if he bit her till she bled. She wondered if
he might bite her.
She was just about to drift off to sleep, wondering, when she
remembered that she had not said her prayers. She got up, and
knelt by the bed and said them, as she had always done, and was
surprised, after she got back into bed, how her prayers and her still
wondering about Mr. Harrick was all part of the same nice warm–
ness of things.
She thought of Mr. Harrick, fully dressed somehow, kneeling
beside the bed with her. She would teach him to pray, to get on
his
knees and pray with her to God, and then she would lie in his
arms all night. No, she revised that, he would be asleep and she
would watch over him. Like praying for him.
* *
*
Now standing in the kitchen, which he had fixed up for her
just like a magazine, quaint and old-timey, she wondered if she could
take him some more iced tea. She wondered if there was anything,
anything in the world, she could do for him.
