"You could wear a wig, of course," said Bertha, soberly. "The eyes would be a difficulty, though, I'm afraid."
"Well, I am here now! and I'm supposed to stay another year, and then go to college. Four—five years more of bondage, and tasks, and lectures on good behaviour! Am I likely to stand it, I ask you?"
"I hope so!" said Gertrude, steadily. "It would be a thousand pities if you didn't, Grace, and you know it as well as I do."
"And if I do, it must be in my own way!" cried the wild girl, swinging round again on her heel. "And if I can make things more endurable here—if I can get rid of—it must be in my own way, I tell you. Snowy, you are like your name, I suppose. You are white and gold and calm,—I don't know what you are, except that we are not of the same flesh. I tell you, I turn to fire inside! I must break out, I must go off when the fit comes on me. I do no harm! It doesn't hurt anybody for me to go down the wall and cool myself with a run in the fields. Why can't I be let alone? I am not a child! I tell you it is the way I am made!"
The Snowy Owl rose, and, going to the fireplace, laid her arm around Grace's shoulder.
"You are making yourself!" she said. "It's your own life, Wolf; are you making it worse or better?"
"I'm not doing either. I am taking it as it comes, as it was meant to come."
Gertrude shook her head quietly.
"That can't be!" she said. "That is impossible, Wolf. We have to be growing one way or the other; we can't stay as we are, for a year or a day. And there's another thing: you don't seem to think about the others, about the effect on the school. If you are to break the laws, why should not every one do the same?"
"Because they are different!" said Grace, sullenly.