“What are you doing off here by yourself, Lou? Mrs. Bemis didn’t know what had become of you, and I’ve been looking everywhere.”
“I dunno,” Lou answered truthfully enough. “I been thinkin’ ’bout the institootion 96where I come from; it was seein’ them little boys put me in mind of it, I reckon. I was kinder wonderin’ what it would be like to really belong to anybody.”
There was neither pathos nor self-pity in her tone, but rather a cold, dispassionate speculation that froze the words of awkward sympathy which rose to his lips, and he remained silent.
“I did once, you know,” she continued, “belong to some–body, I mean. I had on a white dress all trimmed with lace when they found me in the station at the junction an’ took me up to the institootion; it was the only white dress I ever had.”
“Where was this institution, Lou?” Jim asked. “You’ve never told me, you know.”
Lou shrugged.
“Oh, it was ’way up at a place called Mayfield’s Corners; I was most three hours on the train before I got to the station nearest Hess’s farm.”
A vicious desire came over her to shock and repulse that inexplicable thing in him which set him apart from her and made him one 97with the world in which those others moved; that stout gentleman and the young lady who had called him Jimmie. She added deliberately:
“I told you what I did there–at the institootion, I mean: scrubbed an’ cooked an’ washed an’ tended babies an’ wore a uniform, just like any other norphin, I guess. Slep’ in the garret with the rats runnin’ over the floor, an’ got up in the mornin’ to the same old work. It warn’t a State institootion, you see; just a kind of a charity one, run by the deacons of the church; I ain’t got much use for charity.”
“I shouldn’t think you would have,” he exclaimed. “But it’s all behind you now, Lou. We made fourteen miles to-day from Highvale–or will have when we walk down the hill to Riverburgh to-morrow, and it is only sixty miles further to New York.”