But I could never get any of my friends to enjoy it with me.
“Ugh! No.—Are you going out in such weather?” they say when I ask them to go. “Ugh! Such frightful weather.”
So I go alone, up on the hills, or down on the wharf, or anywhere.
That day, too, I was alone. I had gone to the big ice-house at South Bay, because some one had said that a big ship was adrift out there and I wanted to see it. But, if you please, that was all bosh—there was neither ship nor anything else worth looking at in South Bay.
When I go off alone that way I think of tremendously entertaining things. I think of families with ever so many children and the jolly times they have. I know how all the people I invent look, and what they say, and what they do; and they travel over the whole wide world. I decide everything for them. I am queen over them all. To invent this way is the most entertaining thing in the world. Sometimes I tell Karen and Mina about it, but I can see plainly that they don’t understand at all what I mean.
“Do you know these people?” asked Karen once.
“No, I just invent them, you know.”
“Can there be any fun in that?” sniffed Karen, scornfully. Since then I never talk about what I think of when I am alone.
I remember well that as I walked to the icehouse at South Bay that afternoon I made up a story about two little girls who traveled alone all the way to Egypt to visit an awfully rich uncle.
Since there was no ship or anything interesting to be seen, I sat down on the edge of the wharf, thinking it would be fun to see whether the waves would dash high enough to wet my legs if I stretched them far down. One wave after another came rolling in, black but topped with white foam. Whack!—splash!—one struck against the wharf. No, it did not reach me. Now another wave,—an enormous one—but that did not reach me either.