In silence the three of them looked at the sunset and thought about God.
Julia was as happy as Betsy was, almost. One nice thing about Julia was that she rejoiced in other people’s luck.
Isn’t it mysterious to begin a new journal like this? I can run my fingers through the fresh clean pages but I cannot guess what the writing on them will be.
Betsy returned to her chair, took off her coat and hat, opened her book and forgot the world again.
After all, you couldn’t go through life rolling your friendships into one gigantic snowball. You wanted different kinds of friendships, with different kinds of people.
Betsy liked to read her stories aloud and she read them like an actress. She made her voice low and thrillingly deep. She made it shake with emotion. She laughed mockingly and sobbed wildly when the occasion required.
The wastes of snow on the hill were ghostly in the moonlight. The stars were piercingly bright.
Our lives can hold just so much. If they’re filled with one thing, they can’t be filled with another. We ought to do a lot of thinking about what we want to fill them with.
And yet, even as she spoke, she knew that she did not wish to come back. not to stay, not to live. She loved the little yellow cottage more than she loved any place on earth. but she was through with it except in her memories.
Come in early, so there’ll be time to pop corn,’ Mrs. Ray said. If she mentioned popping corn, they always came in early. So she usually mentioned it.
Betsy dreamed about going away from Deep Valley, but she didn’t for a moment suspect that around a bend in her Winding Hall of Fate a journey was actually waiting.
They soon stopped being ten years old. But whatever age they were seemed to be exactly the right age for having fun.
The older I get the more mixed up life seems. When you’re little, it’s all so plain. It’s all laid out like a game ready to play. You think you know exactly how it’s going to go. But things happen…
You don’t grow up, she reasoned now, until you begin to evaluate yourself, to recognize your good traits and acknowledge that you have a few faults.
We’re growing up and I don’t like it,” said Tacy, as they say at Heinz’s later, drinking coffee.
But perhaps people who liked to write aways made lists! Just for the fun of it.
It looks like something out of Whittier’s “Snowbound,”‘ Julia said. Julia could always think of things like that to say.
It was June, and the world smelled of roses. The sunshine was like powdered gold over the grassy hillside.
Betsy liked to talk. Her father always said she got it from her mother, and her mother always said she got it from her father. But whomever she got it from she was certainly a talker.