“That's nice! I'm not afraid of illness, nor of grandfather, nor of his God; but—I want to be free. If you want a thing badly, you're afraid about it.”
I thought of Zachary Pearse's words, “free as a man.”
“Why are you looking at me like that?” she said.
I stammered: “What do you mean by freedom?”
“Do you know what I shall do to-night?” she answered. “Get out of my window by the apple-tree, and go to the woods, and play!”
We were going down a steep lane, along the side of a wood, where there's always a smell of sappy leaves, and the breath of the cows that come close to the hedge to get the shade.
There was a cottage in the bottom, and a small boy sat outside playing with a heap of dust.
“Hallo, Johnny!” said Pasiance. “Hold your leg out and show this man your bad place!” The small boy undid a bandage round his bare and dirty little leg, and proudly revealed a sore.
“Isn't it nasty?” cried Pasiance ruefully, tying up the bandage again; “poor little feller! Johnny, see what I've brought you!” She produced from her pocket a stick of chocolate, the semblance of a soldier made of sealing-wax and worsted, and a crooked sixpence.
It was a new glimpse of her. All the way home she was telling me the story of little Johnny's family; when she came to his mother's death, she burst out: “A beastly shame, wasn't it, and they're so poor; it might just as well have been somebody else. I like poor people, but I hate rich ones—stuck-up beasts.”