The Progress of Love

the Christmas holidays, she had changed a great deal. But she thought it was everything and everybody else that had changed.
    She wanted to know if they had always talked this way. What way? With an accent. Weren’t they doing it on purpose, to sound funny? Weren’t they saying “youse” on purpose, to sound funny?
    She had forgotten where some things were kept, and was astonished to find the frying pan under the stove. She took a dislike to the dog, Tigger, who was allowed to stay in the house now that he was getting old. She said he smelled, and that the couch blanket was full of dog hairs.
    She said the parlor smelled moldy and the walls needed papering.
    But it was her sisters themselves who got the full force of her surprise and displeasure. They had grown since the summer. Dawn Rose was a big stout girl now, with loose breasts jiggling inside her dress, and a broad red face whose childish expression of secretiveness had changed to a look that seemed stupid and stubborn. She had developed womanly smells, and she did not wash. Bonnie Hope was still childish in body, but her frizzy red hair was never combed out properly and she was covered with fleabites that she got from playing with the barn cats.
    Violet hardly knew how to go about cleaning these two up. The worst was that they had become rebellious, looked at each other and snickered when she talked to them, avoided her, were mulish and silent. They acted as if they had some idiotic secret.
    And so they did, they had a secret, but it did not come out until quite a while later, not until after the events of the next summer, and then indirectly, with Bonnie Hope telling some girls who told another who told another, and others getting to hear about it, then a neighbor woman, who finally told Violet.
    In late fall of that year—the year Violet went away to normal school—Dawn Rose had begun to menstruate. She was so affronted by this development that she went down to the creek and sat in the cold water, resolved to get the bleeding stopped. She took off her shoes and stockings and underpants and sat there, in the shallow, icy water. She washed the blood out of her underpants and wrung them out and put them on wet. She didn’t catch cold, she didn’t get sick, and she didn’t menstruate again all year. The neighbor woman said that such a procedure could have affected her brain.
    “Driving all that bad blood back into her system, it could have.”
    Violet’s only pleasure that Christmas was in talking about her boyfriend, whose name was Trevor Auston. She showed her sisters his picture. It was cut from a newspaper. He wore his clerical collar.
    “He looks like a minister,” said Dawn Rose, snickering.
    “He is. That picture’s from when he was ordained. Don’t you think he’s handsome?”
    Trevor Auston was handsome. He was a dark-haired young man with narrowed eyes and a perfect nose, a chin flung up in the air, and a thin-lipped, confident, even gracious smile.
    Bonnie Hope said, “He must be old, to be a minister.”
    “He just got to be a minister,” said Violet. “He’s twenty-six. He isn’t an Anglican minister, he’s a United Church minister,” she said, as if that made a difference. And to her it did. Violet had changed churches in Ottawa. She said that at the United church there was a lot more going on. There was a badminton club—both she and Trevor played—and a drama club, as well as skating parties, tobogganing parties, hayrides, socials. It was at a Halloween socialin the church basement, bobbing for apples, that Violet and Trevor first met. Or first talked, because Violet of course had noticed him before in church, where he was the assistant minister. He said that he had noticed her, too. And she thought that maybe he had. A group of girls from the normal school all went to that church together, partly on Trevor’s account, and they played a game, trying to catch his eye. When everybody was standing up singing the hymns, they stared at him, and if he looked back they dropped their eyes at once. Waves of giggles would spread along the row. But Violet sang right back at him as if her eyes had just lit on him by accident:
“Rise up, oh men of God
And gird your armour on—”
    Locked eyes during the hymn-singing. The virile hymns of the old Methodists and the scourging psalms of the Presbyterians had come together in this new United Church. The ministry then, in that church, attracted vigorous young men intent on power, not