The words were picked carefully. "She wanted me to live as her echo—parrot her likes and dislikes, accept every limping bias as final truth. My mother was the same type." He fancied that the eyes shone more lustrously; but they were turned away. This topic, of the conflict between the girl and her parents, stirred him to a disquieting curiosity, avid for all the details, the hows and the whys; as if the answers held some clew that he sought for.
She answered the question that he refrained from asking. "Yes, she's alive; I left her, to go and live with Auntie. The thing sounds unbelievable, and ridiculous; but she wanted to keep me forever at the age of thirteen and a half. Father was dead, and she looked young; a grown daughter was something to explain away. Why, she would have kept me in knee skirts if the neighbors hadn't talked.... When she married again, I left."
"Are those the only times you ran away?" he smiled the query.
She pointed to the red scowl in the north, where some startled furnace had opened its giant eye beneath the cloudy mirror of the heavens. "Isn't it marvelous!... Did I ever run away before? I believe when I was four I got tired of home—we were living in Indiana then—packed my rag doll and the puppy into my baby-carriage, and started out.... They caught me before I had gone a block."
He watched the vacant sky. The red glare had abruptly died. "You should see the view from our crest—Crenshaw Hill.... I almost ran away, once. I got as far as the railroad station." He detailed the weeks of punishment that had preceded his attempted escape.
"Your father must be a brute!" The contagious sympathy that shook her tones moved him.
"He's really nice.... His viewpoint is old-fashioned."
"Old fashioned! It's paleolithic. No wonder you ran away."
"He figured that I was his son—accent on the 'his.' He has the idea still."
She stared moodily at the dark blankness of the mountain, then swung beside him on a slender coping at the head of a little park lost in a bend of the highland boulevard.