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The record of this period of my life is perforce wearisome and undramatic. There are no events. More than ever my real life was inside me, was make-believe; that is, real. Change of residence was but a change of stage. The same comedy-tragedy—ME—was for ever on the boards. Not that the change of stage meant nothing. Houses, rooms, weathers, smells, all affected and were somehow a part of my thoughts. The two towns, I knew, were intimately mixed up with my feelings about all that had happened to me in them. Torribridge was the more romantic: little white town made magical by the word-sorcery of Westward Ho! Quay that harboured brown-sailed ships from the Indies, memories of the Rose of Torribridge and that salmon-coloured hostelry called by her name; then Number One, house of gold and murder and mystery. Tawborough was more real. Graced by no Rose of Torridge, she held instead the rose of merchandise. The busy, countrified, unimaginably English character of her market and her streets seemed to make her more genuine, more actual—the right word eludes me—than Torribridge: Torribridge, that eight months' rainbow-circled nightmare, mere invention of Mr. Kingsley and Robbie and Uncle Simeon. Act Three was back in the first setting again; and here, in dining-room, in bed, in attic, the play went on. The principal character was Mary Lee. The audience was Mary Lee. I was player, producer, public all in one.
"Mary," I would say, as soon as I was alone. "Listen, I will tell you what I think."
"Yes, Mary; do!"
This sense of two selves, one of whom could confide in the other, was ever more vivid. Some one else inside me was pleased, surprised, angered, grieved; shared my sorrows and triumphs. Thus it was that in weeping for myself after some cruelty of Aunt Jael's or some more spiritual grief, I felt I was not selfish, because I was sharing trouble with some one else, who lived in the same body. Such impressions are at once too rudimentary and too subtle to be well conveyed in words.
When I called out "Mary," and "I" answered "Yes" the reality of question and answer between two different, though curiously intimate persons, was physical, overwhelming.
Soon after my return to my Grandmother's this sense of dual personality began, in its most physical manifestations, to fade somewhat; in its more spiritual quality, to grow more intense: the first when I began my Diary, the second at the miraculous moment of my Baptism.