e years had much waking time to herself. In younger and
less crowded hours, before her father had been informed by the
authorities that he must either send his child to school or take the
consequences, Susan had put in all her spare moments at wondering. She
would see a toad in the back yard, for example, under a plantain leaf,
and she would begin to wonder. She would wonder what it felt like to be
a toad. And before very long something would happen to her, inside, and
she would _be_ a toad. She would have toad thoughts and toad
feelings.... There would stretch above her a dim, green, balancing
canopy--the plantain leaf. All about her were soaring, translucent
fronds--the grass. It was cool there under the plantain leaf; but she
was enormously fat and ugly, her brain felt like sooty cobwebs, and
nobody loved her.

Still, she didn't care much. She could feel her soft gray throat, like
a blown-into glove finger, pulsing slowly--which was almost as soothing
a sensation as letting the swing die down. It made her feel as if
Someone--some great unhappy cloudlike Being--were making up a song, a
song about most everything; chanting it sleepily to himself--or was it
_herself_?--somewhere; and as if she were part of this beautiful,
unhappy song. But all the time she knew that if that white fluffy
restlessness--that moth miller--fluttered only a little nearer among
those golden-green fronds, she knew if it reached the cool rim of her
plantain shade, she knew, then, that something terrible would happen to
her--knew that something swift and blind, that she couldn't help, would
coil deep within her like a spring and so launch her forward,
open-jawed. It was awful--awful for the moth miller--but she couldn't
_not_ do it. She was a toad....

And it was the same with her father. There were things he couldn't not
do. She could be--sitting very still in a corner--_be_ her father, when
he was angry; and she knew he couldn't help it. It was just a dark slow
whirling inside, with red sparks flying swiftly out from it. And it hurt
while it lasted. Being her father like that always made her sorry for
him. But she wished, and she felt he must often wish, that he couldn't
be at all. There were lots of live things that would be happier if they
weren't live things; and _if_ they weren't, Susan felt, the great
cloudlike Being would be less unhappy too.

Naturally, I am giving you Susan's later interpretations of her
pre-schoolday wonderings; and