'You,' I supplied softly.
'Well, yes, take me.' She turned and flashed a sudden smile at me. 'I've always wanted everything, and I've had—nothing.'
She spoke the word as if it were the pot of gold at the foot of the rainbow.
'It took me a long time to understand,' she went on quietly, as I made no comment. 'I suppose that was natural. I was young; and I had never happened to hear of a case like mine. At first, I thought that, just because I wanted a thing, I was bound to have it. There was my mother.'
Again she paused, and a tender, glowing light appeared in her face, like the quickening of a latent fire. It was eloquent of all sorts of passionate, youthful, eager things.
'I guess I worshiped my mother,' she submitted simply. 'Maybe you think that, anyway, I had her. But, no, I hadn't. She liked me well enough. Mothers do. But we had a big family, and we lived in a big house, and she was very busy. It bothered her to have me get in her way with my huggings and kissings. Why in the world couldn't I wait until bedtime? Poor mother! She never did seem to know what to make of my devotion. People don't like to be loved too well; it embarrasses them.
'She died when I was fourteen. And I thought I'd die too.'
There was no shadow on Hesper's face as she remembered her young, far-away anguish; rather, there was a strange deepening of peace. But she was silent for two or three minutes; and I noticed that she put out her hand and caressed an old-fashioned, crocheted tidy that lay on the arm of a chair which she had brought out on the porch. When she resumed her story, she spoke somewhat more rapidly.
'I was sick a long time. If I hadn't been, I think I might have gone crazy. But pain took my attention, and weakness made me sleep a good deal; and when I came to get up again, I was quieter. I spent lots of time in the fields and woods. I had always loved them, and now they seemed to help me more than anything else. There was something about them so big that it was willing to let me love it as much as I wanted to. That was comforting. When I was in the woods, I felt as if I had hold of an endless thread. You know how it is?'
She appealed to me.