One
boy, with the inimitable drawl of the race, pushed back his ice-cream
and addressed it with a mournful head-shake:
"Go way, honey, yo' los' yo' tas'e!"
The dress was plain and fitted every curving of a healthy girlish form.
She paused a moment white-bodied and white-limbed but dark and
velvet-armed, her full neck and oval head rising rich and almost black
above, with its deep-lighted eyes and crown of silent darkling hair.
To some, such a revelation of grace and womanliness in this hoyden, the
gentle swelling of lankness to beauty, of lowliness to shy self-poise,
was a sudden joy, to others a mere blindness. Mary Taylor was perplexed
and in some indefinite way amazed; and many of the other teachers saw no
beauty, only a strangeness that brought a smile. They were such as know
beauty by convention only, and find it lip-ringed, hoop-skirted,
tattooed, or corsetted, as time and place decree.
The change in Zora, however, had been neither cataclysmic nor
revolutionary and it was yet far--very far--from complete. She still ran
and romped in the woods, and dreamed her dreams; she still was
passionately independent and "queer." Tendencies merely had become
manifest, some dominant. She would, unhindered, develop to a brilliant,
sumptuous womanhood; proud, conquering, full-blooded, and deep
bosomed--a passionate mother of men.
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