Theirs was a balanced, exceptionally happy friendship: skinny, scared, precocious Prudence Jamieson and pretty, placid, trustful Laura Lee Matthews. Such friendships quite often occur, of course, among small girls. They find each other. What was perhaps unusual about this one was its having been arranged, indeed contrived, by the parents involved, for their own convenience—so often under such circumstances the children refuse to like each other. But Prudence and Laura Lee really took to each other, as their grateful, hard-drinking parents remarked, making everything easy for the parents (for a while). In any case, in the long, Southern summer twilights, after supper the small girls used to play in the sprawling, bountiful Matthews garden, and one of their favorite pastimes involved making a series of precariously fragile, momentarily lovely dolls out of flower petals. Pansy faces with hollyhock skirts, like dancers’ tutus, for example, or petunia skirts and tiny rosebud faces. The idea had been Prudence’s, but Laura Lee was more successful in its execution, being more patient and much more deftly fingered.
