“P’r’aps they-all don’t know you as well as I do.” This with amusing conviction.
“Perhaps they don’t.” Truedale was deadly solemn. “But go on, Nella-Rose. I promise not to laugh now.”
“It was the beginning of—you!” The girl turned her eyes to the fire—she was quaintly demure. “At first when I saw you looking in that window, yonder, I was right scared.”
Jim White’s statement that Nella-Rose wasn’t more than half real seemed, in the light of present happenings, little less than bald fact.
“It was the way you looked—way back there when I was ten years old. I had run away—”
“Are you always running away?” asked Truedale from the hollow depths of unreality.
“I run away a smart lot. You have to if you want to—see things and be different.”
“And you—you want to be different, Nella-Rose?”
“I—why, can’t you see?—I am different.”
“Of course. I only meant—do you like to be different.”