

This etext was transcribed by Les Bowler.

                          [Picture: Book cover]

                    [Picture: Being thrown by Paprika]





                                 AZALEA’S
                                SILVER WEB


                                    BY
                             ELIA W. PEATTIE
                Author of Azalea; Annie Laurie and Azalea;
                        Azalea at Sunset Gap, etc.

                            _Illustrations by_
                            _E. R. Kirkbride_

                                * * * * *

                        [Picture: Publisher logo]

                                * * * * *

                         The Reilly & Britton Co.
                                 Chicago

                                * * * * *

                             Copyright, 1915
                                    by
                         The Reilly & Britton Co.

                                * * * * *




CONTENTS

CHAPTER                                    PAGE
          I  GROWN GIRLS                      9
         II  NEW RELATIONS                   27
        III  OWN FOLK                        46
         IV  MADAM GRANDMOTHER               64
          V  MALLOWBANKS                     82
         VI  MY BALL                        101
        VII  GETTING SETTLED                120
       VIII  THE PORTRAIT                   139
         IX  GRANDMOTHER’S STORY            158
          X  “THE WATERS OF QUIET”          177
         XI  A FRIEND                       195
        XII  A TRAVEL LOG                   212
       XIII  CROSSROADS                     231
        XIV  “WHERE THERE IS A WILL”        250
         XV  “RING, HAPPY BELLS”            267

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

So, in a moment more I felt myself—I who had never      _Frontispiece_
been thrown in my life—going over Paprika’s head
We stepped back in the shrubbery and kept very                      84
still while they passed.  Grandmother was weeping
like a hurt child
Azalea’s Coming Out Party                                          114
It was Keefe O’Connor who stood there holding out                  276
his hands to me

CHAPTER I
GROWN GIRLS


                                                 Tennyson Mountain, N. C.,
                                                                October 6.

_Carin_, _dear and far_:

So you are back at your beloved Vassar!  Does it seem as wonderful as it
did last year?  Or more so?  More so, I expect.  You were a little lonely
and strange last year, you know.  But now it will be different.  The
girls will seem like old friends to you now that you are coming back to
them.  But, Carin, girl, they cannot _possibly_ be such old friends as I
am, or as Annie Laurie is.  Don’t dare to like one of them better than
you like us.  I can imagine, and really spend too much time imagining,
just how lovely and cultivated and surprising some of them are.  But,
please, aren’t some of them quite stupid, too?  I hope so.  Annie Laurie
hopes so.  We want still to be the brightest stars in your sky.

Lest you should think we are not, we keep polishing ourselves.  Annie
Laurie, when she is not attending to her dairy, will take university
extension work.  And I, your own ever adoring, ever grateful Azalea, will
keep hammering away at the books that dear Barbara Summers lends, and
Keefe O’Connor sends down from New York, and those that your own library
at the Shoals furnishes.

I have the heart to read, Carin, but not the time.  That’s the truth.
Or, come to think of it, perhaps it is a matter of eyelids.  I have a
queer, self-closing pair.  If they would stay up after nine o’clock at
night I could learn something.  But, no, they appear to be attached to a
wheel or a ratchet in the clock, and when nine strikes, down they go and
down they stay.

What can I do?

Nothing, except kiss dearest Mother McBirney good night, trying not to
yawn in her face as I do it, and after paying my respects to Father
McBirney and “brother” Jim, slip away up to my darling loft.

Now, there, Carin!  You see I’m nicer than your other friends, more
unusual and surprising.  (You told me the last time I saw you that you
liked your friends to be unusual and surprising.)  Well, have you any
other friend who goes up to her bedroom by means of an outside pair of
stairs and who sleeps in a loft, with a tame bat for company?  You have
not, Carin Carson, and you know it.  And, Oh, how I love it!  Shall I
ever have another room I love so well?  The soft noises of the night come
purling down into it like a stream.  The stars of the northern sky shine
into it.  The mountain-side is like a green curtain hanging before it.
When I get up in that little room, my doors and windows wide to old Mount
Tennyson’s whispering side, I seem to find my real self.  Everything
slips away from me except the night and myself and—and God.

Dearest Carin, I am feeling rather serious.  It is because of something
that I have just come to realize.  Do you remember how, at the end of our
school-teaching up at Sunset Gap three years ago, your father and mother
offered to send me away to school, and I—thanking them more than I could
possibly make them understand—refused?  I said I wanted it to be Azalea
for herself.  That I meant to spin my own little web, and that I hoped it
would be a silver one.

Since then, as you know, I have tried my best.  I decided that I would
become a teacher of the mountain handicrafts; I hoped that some day when
good Mrs. Kitchell resigned her position as head of the Mountain
Industries which your father and mother established, that I could take
her place.  What is more, I wanted to develop the Industries so that they
would become much, much more useful and inspiring and important than they
are now.  I wanted, too, to fit myself to meet all the people who come to
Lee—all the charming, gracious people.  You know how I have worked for
all this.  Haystack Thompson, the best basket-maker in the country, has
taught me to make baskets.  Mrs. Kitchell, the cleverest little weaver of
all the weavers, has instructed me in the weaving of woolen and linen and
cotton cloth, and in the making of counterpanes, as well as the knotting
of fringe and the looping of fancy edges.  Mother McBirney has taught me
knitting and lace making and crocheting.  I can do a little wood carving.
I can make mats.  I can weave carpets.  Even, if put to it, I can turn a
jug.  Then I have read and studied and thought.  And in doing all that I
have grown vain and foolish.

I’ll tell you how I found out.

Dear Father McBirney isn’t well.  I think I spoke about this to you the
other day.  But he’s been getting rapidly worse, and now he can hardly
move from his chair.  It is rheumatism; and it’s likely to stay with him
for a long, long time.  He cannot help about the farm at all, and so all
of the farm work falls on Jim.  He can’t even go about the country to
collect the chairs the mountaineers make for the Mountain Industries, as
he promised your father he would.

Oh, Carin, do you remember the day you and your father and mother came up
to our cabin to ask my foster-parents to go down and take charge of the
Industries?  And do you remember how Pa and Ma looked about at the
darling cabin with its wistaria and trumpet vine, and its Pride of India
tree with the graves of their little Molly and my own dear mama beneath
it, and how they would not go?  And then do you recall how Father
McBirney promised to “beat up trade” for the Industries, and so we all
stayed in the cabin with its nice open room in between the closed ones,
and its own queer little smithy,