Anger surged over me and then died as quickly as it had come. Again she had me. The quiver in her voice showed me what her sincerity had cost her, and so did her next words:—
“I wanted one so always that I just had to make-believe.”
Here one had the heart of truth, stripped of the spirit of make-believe which it had clothed in quaint and absurd garments. Again I squeezed Ellen’s hand in mine.
I tell all these things in detail because this was so Ellen. She had this dual nature which fought forever in her heart,—the passion for make-believe and the fundamental need of telling the truth,—always to herself, and often embarrassingly to those she loved.
She comments as follows on this episode, unconsciously showing me as the young prig I was:—
“The moment Roberta picked up a rock to fight for my brother, I knew I should have to tell her the truth. I saw right away how good Roberta was. She has very lovely blue eyes and her hair is so smooth and shiny that I don’t believe she musses it when she sleeps. She looked at me so straight and her eyes were so round that it was very hard work to tell her that the Sweeney baby was not my brother, but I gritted my teeth and did it. The rest was easy on account of her soft heart.”
CHAPTER II
The heart of man is mysterious. Why a passionately expressed desire to spit upon one should be alluring, God knows—I don’t. It was fatal to Alec. I see him now jumping up and down outside the fence, shouting forth: “Ya ha! Ya ha! You can’t get me!”—or wooing Ellen by the subtle method of attaching a hard green apple to a supple stick and flinging it at her. The relations of these two, as you can see, were deep from the first.
Ellen, more than any of the rest of us, had sharp recrudescences back to little girlhood just as she flamed further ahead on the shimmering path of adolescence. Thus she covered a wide gamut of years in her everyday life. I think it is this ability to roam up and down time that makes life interesting, more than any other thing.