I opened one wet eye, and stole a cautious glance at grandmother.
"Never, Robert, never!"
I began to cry again harder than before.
Then my father took me in his arms, and carried me upstairs to my mother.
"Grandmother has been making her tell the truth," he said, ruefully. "She hasn't any sympathy with Rhoda's imagination."
So even in those early days I found that I had an imagination, just as I had a chair with long legs, and a blue plate, and a silver mug. It was a sleeping imagination as yet, for though I had a beautiful blue plate with a blue bridge over a blue and white stream, I never imagined until after years that those tiny figures on the bridge were lovers running away from a cruel parent. Then the bridge was the spot beyond which the gravy must not flow. When it swept over the boundary which I marked for it, I pounded the table with impotent rage, and would eat no more dinner.
"If she were a child of mine," grandmother said, sternly, "she should eat her dinner. It is simply preposterous that her temper should be allowed to go unchecked. What will she be when she grows up!"
"I don't think that Rhoda has a bad temper," my mother replied, plaintively. "It's only that she's the soul of order."
My mother always discovered an excuse that fitted my case, and that critical grandparent of mine found the ground swept from beneath her feet. I was the soul of order. She had seen me herself with my large basketful of toys wending wearily about the house. It was a large basket, a beautiful yellow one with a red handle, and when I began to play my things came out of it, and when I was through playing they went into the yellow basket again. I had a rag doll of a pleasing appearance, named Arabella, and a black woolly creature, which to the eye of affection was a dog, and some of the small bits of carved wood with which a wooden Noah intended to replenish his earth. I played the most delightful games with these toys, and my mother played with me like another small child.