"You used to be so much alone," Mrs. Buckley continued. Mary breathed sharply, and her mother kissed her sympathetically. "But now you always have your sister with you. Isn't it fine, dearie?"
"Yes, ma'am," repeated the victim, and bent her little energies to the treadmill task of wheeling the gocart to the orchard gate, where all wonders began, and then, with an effort as exhausting to the will as to the body, turning her back upon the lane, the river, and the sentinel tree, to trundle her Juggernaut between serried rows of cabbages and carrots.
Then slowly she began to hate, with a deep, abiding hatred, the flannel bundle. She loathed the very smell of flannel before Theodora was six short weeks old, and the sight of the diminutive laundry, which hung upon the line between the cherry trees, almost drove her to arson.
The shy, quick-darting creature—half child and half humming bird—was forced to drag that monstrous perambulator on all her expeditions. After a month's confinement to the garden, where knights and ladies never penetrate, she managed to bump her responsibility out into the orchard. But the glory was all in the treetops, and Mary soon grew restless under her mother's explicit directions. "Up and down the walks" meant imprisonment, despair. Theodora should have tried to make her role of Albatross as acceptable as it might be made to the long-suffering mariner about whose neck she hung, but she showed a callousness and a heartless selfishness which nothing could excuse. Mary would sometimes plead with all gentleness and courtesy for a few short moments' freedom.
"Theodora," she would begin, "Theodora, listen to me a minute," and the gift of God would make aimless pugilistic passes at her interlocutor.
"O Theodora, I'm awful tired of stayin' down here on the ground. Wouldn't you just as lieves play you was a mad bull an' I was a lady in a red dress?"
Theodora, after some space spent in apparent contemplation, would wave a cheerful acquiescence.
"An' then I'll be scared of you, an' I'll run away an' climb as high as anything in the hickory tree up there on the hill. Let's play it right now, Theodora. There's something I want to see up there."
Taking her sister's bland smile for ratification and agreement, Mary would set about her personification, shed her apron lest its damaged appearance convict her in older eyes, and speed toward her goal. But the mad bull's shrieks of protest and repudiation would startle every bit of chivalry for miles and miles around.
Several experiences of this nature taught Mary, that, in dealing with infants of changeable and rudimentary mind, honesty was an impossible policy and candor a very boomerang, which returned and smote one with savage force. So she stooped to guile and detested the flannel all the more deeply because of the state to which it was debasing an upright conscience and a high sense of honor.