Lilly, with the mysterious tenacity of a crannied flower, was pulling
from her soil toward the light. And light in all its chiaroscuras rules
the _se leve, couche_, complexion, and humors of the world. Lindsley
was a ray.
And so her adolescence came in suddenly, almost stormlike, uprooting
little forests of sapling traditions.
At sixteen she still slept on the cot drawn across the bed end and rode
her bicycle up and down the sidewalks, holding her skirts down against
the wind, but also she had ransacked the boarding-house shelves and High
School library, reading her uncensored way through _Lady Audrey's
Secret, Canterbury Tales, Five Little Peppers and How They Grew, Plain
Facts About Life, Arabian Nights, Golden Treasury, Childe Harold, To
Have and to Hold, Tales from Shakespeare, Pilgrim's Progress, Old
Curiosity Shop, Diary of Marie Baschkertcheff, Pride and Prejudice,
Vanity Fair, Les Miserables, Stories of the Operas_, and a red volume
rescued from propping up the hall hatrack, _Great Lovers_.
Within that same year Katy Stutz twice lowered her skirt hems.
"Mamma, I think it is terrible I haven't a room to myself.
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