Nevertheless there was a change. No one can go away from a village as a runaway beggar girl taking the town mystery and richest person in it at the same time and leave a broken heart to keep green her memory, without somewhat of a readjustment. Nor can she return three years later both famous and rich and lovelier than ever without further complications.
The homey things which Thurley had anticipated would set her right in magic fashion irritated and disappointed her. She wanted to return the same wild rose she had left, being treated as such. But her grandeur was like a stone wall over which the village took turns at peeking and saying, “Well, well, well, so this is Thurley Precore—well, well, _well_!”
Twelve hours after she had come into the town she was bored to extinction. She missed the excitement of her other life and wondered why she had not stayed on to do the things society had begged of her. Birge’s Corners was as removed from the real world as Iceland from the tropics, they did not appreciate or comprehend her! She was still just a “lucky girl” in their eyes; they almost questioned her success. She would have to die and leave funds for a public drinking fountain before the village would acclaim her as their own with joy and alacrity.
The hills seemed small and stunted and the air over-dusty and hot. The old drive along the river was stupid, she decided, as she took it and was prepared to be drifted back into enchanted girlhood. Her accompanist, who was with her, agreed when Thurley remarked that one never remembered childhood joys with accuracy. The accompanist was thinking of _her_ own home town where the hills were green and gorgeous and the river sparkling—but the accompanist had not been home in some time either!
The summer yawned before Thurley like a dark cavern. She longed for fall and work—glimpses of Hobart with snubs and sarcasm from him if nothing else. She wanted Ernestine; she felt she could become as cynical as Ernestine with no trouble at all and she would agree with Caleb that “kiss-baby” copy was perfectly proper if people were fools enough to pay for it; she resolved to play cards for money the next winter, as Lissa urged, and really to bully Polly into accepting decent clothes and being some one respectable. She wanted Collin to paint her portrait in a certain cream satin frock, because she wanted to know what Hobart would say of it, and as for Mark—there was a dangerous expression in Thurley’s eyes as she thought of what she might or might not do concerning him ... besides, there were many others who would pay her attention, rich, powerful, foolish creatures who follow such butterflies as religiously as the hounds do the hares. Every one must decide early in the game if he is to run with the hounds or with the hares! Thurley had not yet decided. She knew that as she came home from the disappointing river drive the last resolve to be natural and her wild-rose self vanished—it was the final straw which turned her in the way Lissa’s white fingers had pointed.