One can't do it alone.

Now, if Jerry would only-- But it isn't time to speak of Jerry yet.
I'll go back to my girlhood.
It was a trying period--it must have been--for Father and Mother, in spite of their great love for me, and their efforts to create for me a happiness that would erase the past from my mind.

I realize it now.
For, after all, I was just a girl--a young girl, like other girls; high-strung, nervous, thoughtless, full of my whims and fancies; and, in addition, with enough of my mother and enough of my father within me to make me veritably a cross-current and a contradiction, as I had said that I was in the opening sentence of my childish autobiography.
I had just passed my sixteenth birthday when we all came back to live in Andersonville.

For the first few months I suspect that just the glory and the wonder and joy of living in the old home, with Father and Mother _happy together_, was enough to fill all my thoughts.

Then, as school began in the fall, I came down to normal living again, and became a girl--just a growing girl in her teens.
How patient Mother was, and Father, too! I can see now how gently and tactfully they helped me over the stones and stumbling-blocks that strew the pathway of every sixteen-year-old girl who thinks, because she has turned down her dresses and turned up her hair, that she is grown up, and can do and think and talk as she pleases.
I well remember how hurt and grieved and superior I was at Mother's insistence upon more frequent rubbers and warm coats, and fewer ice-cream sodas and chocolate bonbons.