The woman came to me in my dreams and tormented me. As I came to know her kind, in the scrub, the hammock and the piney-woods, I knew that it was a woman much like her who had made a home under the live oak. The only way I could shake free of her was to write of her, and she was Florry in Jacob's Ladder. She still clung to me and she was Allie in Golden Apples. Now I know that she will haunt me as long as I live, and all the writing in the world will not put away the memory of her face and the sound of her voice.
