more a child, with thoughts as
proud and fierce and beautiful as Valkyries.

II. SOLITUDE

AMONG the pictures that I see when I look back into the past, is the one
where I, a sullen, egotistic person nine years old, stood quite alone
in the world. To be sure, there were father and mother in the house, and
there were the other children, and not one among them knew I was
alone. The world certainly would not have regarded me as friendless or
orphaned. There was nothing in my mere appearance, as I started away to
school in my clean ginghams, with my well-brushed hair, and embroidered
school-bag, to lead any one to suppose that I was a castaway. Yet I
was--I had discovered this fact, hidden though it might be from others.

I was no longer loved. Father and mother loved the other children; but
not me. I might come home at night, fairly bursting with important news
about what had happened in class or among my friends, and try to relate
my little histories. But did mother listen? Not at all. She would nod
like a mandarin while I talked, or go on turning the leaves of her book,
or writing her letter. What I said was of no importance to her.

Father was even less interested. He frankly told me to keep still, and
went on with the accounts in which he was so absurdly interested, or
examined "papers"--stupid-looking things done on legal cap, which he
brought home with him from the office. No one kissed me when I started
away in the morning; no one kissed me when I came home at night. I
went to bed unkissed. I felt myself to be a lonely and misunderstood
child--perhaps even an adopted one.

Why, I knew a little girl who, when she went up to her room at night,
found the bedclothes turned back, and the shade drawn, and a screen
placed so as to keep off drafts. And her mother brushed her hair twenty
minutes by the clock each night, to make it glossy; and then she sat by
her bed and sang softly till the girl fell asleep.

I not only had to open my own bed, but the beds for the other children,
and although I sometimes felt my mother's hand tucking in the bedclothes
round me, she never stooped and kissed me on the brow and said, "Bless
you, my child." No one, in all my experience, had said, "Bless you, my
child." When the girl I have spoken of came into the room, her mother
reached out her arms and said, before everybody, "Here comes my
dear little girl." When I came into a room, I was usually told to do
something for somebody