Giant by Edna Ferber Page B

the whole of Ohio she hasn’t laughed at from the time she was thirteen. She’s past twenty. Ican’t keep Lacey in pigtails forever waiting for Leslie to marry.” She was becoming incoherent. “Look at her! She says I’m feudal. And I said to him right out that she was skinny as a bird dog and her eyes—how did I know he had millions of acres and everybody knew about him—you bring a man into the house and you never even…”
    “But Lacey’s only a kid and she isn’t skinny. She’s overplump if anything. What’s she got to do with it?”
    “Lacey! Who’s talking about Lacey! Leslie! Leslie! For years she’s been going on about how silly Washington society is and how she hates dinners and teas and calling cards and why can’t things be big and real and American and here is this man with millions of land why it’s an empire and you never even mentioned to me…”
    At quarter of eleven Leslie Lynnton pleaded a crashing headache together with various other racking complications and left the Hunt Ball flat, returning to her home under the somewhat dazed escort of a bewildered young man who had long been a willing but unrewarded victim. She went straight to the library but seemed disappointed in what she found—or failed to find—there. But she made three silent trips between the library and her bedroom, her arms loaded each time with books of assorted sizes. These she plumped down on her bed and it was surrounded by these tomes that her sister Lacey in the room next door came upon her in a spirit of investigation, having seen her light and heard her moving about.
    Lacey poked her head in at the door. “I thought it was burglars or a lover,” she said.
    Leslie glanced up from the book she was reading. “Well, it would have been nice to see you in either case. And where do you learn such talk!”
    “What are you home for!”
    “To read. About Texas.”
    “You mean you came home from the Hunt Ball just to have a read! About Texas!”
    “Go along to bed,” Leslie said. “There’s a good child.”
    Lacey gave her a hard look. “Aha!” she said. “Likewise oho! Texas, huh?”
    The Lynnton family knew what Leslie meant when she said she was going to have a read. Her bed in the old Virginia house was by no means the meager maiden couch upon which the unwed usually compose themselves to sleep. Leslie had seized upon a vast four-poster that had reposed for years in the jungleland of the attic. Originally it must have been meant for at least one pair of ancestors and a suckling infant. A vast plateau, as broad as it was long and as long as any six-foot Virginian could have wished, it stood, not with its headboard against the wall as is the custom of all well-behaved beds, but in the middle of the room for reasons that no one of the family could fathom and that Leslie never explained. The headboard soared almost to the ceiling. Above blazed a crystal chandelier, full blast, and on either side were lamps. All over the bed and in piles on the floor were books large and small, making a sort of stockade in the confines of which Leslie Lynnton had composed herself to read for hours. Books of history, encyclopedias, pamphlets, almanacs, even fiction. Leslie Lynnton read and as she read she twined and untwined a lock of hair between her fingers until tendrils curls and wisps stood up, medusa-like, all over her head.
    Upon this spectacle Lacey gazed without astonishment.
    “Oh, Leslie, are you in love with him!”
    “Perhaps. Yes, I think so. He says Texas is different from any other state in the whole United States.”
    “Pooh! Everybody says that about their own state. That’s what Papa says about Ohio and Mama about Virginia.”
    “Not like that. He talks as if it were a different country altogether. A country all by itself that just happens to be in the middle of the United States.”
    “It isn’t in the middle. It’s way down near Mexico or something.”
    Leslie ignored this. “He calls it ‘my