"It's like that—like that I'll be," thought the child, tumbling to the ground.
Feverishly she swept the card-basket and the books off the table. Then, drawing up a chair, she climbed up on it, clinching her teeth and setting her jaws to bear the shock that perhaps awaited her. And still there was hope in her heart as she leaned forward on the marble top and looked into the mottled glass with imploring eyes. Slowly the tears gathered. In mute agony she turned away, climbed off the table, and hung limp over the back of the chair.
"Oh, God, I'm ugly!" she said, and clung there with shut, hot eyes. The moments passed. "I can't bear it, God. Let me die!"
The strained voice was muffled in her clinched little jaws, and with her fists she beat helplessly on the back of the old-fashioned chair. Presently she slipped down to the floor, and wandered aimless about the room. When she came near the glass again she glanced with a sharp conviction of intolerable shame at the top of a shaggy head, which was all that she could see. Even that was too much. She flew to the window and drew the shutters to, feeling she should never be able to bear the light again.
"What did You make me for?" she cried, arrested an angry instant, facing sharply about, as though confronting an enemy. "I didn't want to come if I had to be ugly!" She slid down off the window-seat, and walked quickly to and fro with rising anger. "It would have been so easy, too, for You. Just think what it means to me!" She stopped and looked heavenward. The "Oirish oyes" were blazing. "I should think You'd prefer things pretty for yourself. But if You don't, why do You go and spoil it all for me?" And so on, in frantic young fashion, she beat her wings against the old prison-house. For between the origin of evil and the origin of ugliness there is no great gulf fixed in the female mind.
Looking back long afterwards on this hour of anguish, she could not laugh, as philosophic grown-up folk are pleased to do, at the sorrows of childhood. She knew that that morning in the musty parlor was one of the bitterest experiences life had brought her, simply because it had come to her as a child, for whom beauty was as yet a conventional physical perfection, and not the high soul of things.
After the one-o'clock dinner, she had shaken Emmie off, and gone out to walk up and down in the warm wind behind the house. She had come out bareheaded, and her shock of wild hair was blown about almost as if some one were saying the "I b'lieve," and the Windgeist, or some other "der stets verneint," had borrowed Val's form of dissent.
She was a thin slip of a girl, and no one seeing her would have much wondered that this young worshipper of obvious red-cheeked, dimpled, yellow-haired, picture-book beauty, had been bitterly disappointed with the thin little face, its irregular lines and faint coloring, the good-sized mouth in lieu of the heroine's puckered rosebud, the tawny no color, all colors, hair, that merely waved distractingly instead of curling; the black eyebrows and lashes, too well defined—yes, "smutty"; the long, deep-set gray eyes, that no wishing could make blue before the glass, but that sometimes, out in the sunshine, changed to turquoise, and sometimes in the dusk or lamplight were limpid, gleaming black.
"Hello!" said Jerry, through the osage-trees.