Ted continued to regard her with that speculative gaze. "Well, you are a queer one!" he ejaculated slowly.
Sheila flushed. She had abased herself in penitence, and he only thought her queer. He always thought her queer! She turned on him with a flare of temper that burned up her humility so far as he was concerned:
"How dare you call me queer? How dare you call me silly? I hate you, Theodore Kent! I never want to see you again as long as I live! You're—you're an abomination in the eyes of the Lord!"
And with this scriptural anathema, plagiarized from the Presbyterian minister's latest sermon, she flung away from him in a fit of wrath that did much to restore her normal self-respect.
However, though she felt no further uneasiness in the presence of Ted—whom she forgave the next day with the readiness that is the virtue of a quick temper—she continued her vigil over herself until time softened her impression of her iniquity. And even then, when her self-criticism had relaxed, her consciousness of her individual temperament remained. She had discovered herself, and this self, like her shadow which she had discovered with wild excitement in her babyhood, would be her life companion. After she ceased to fear it, as a possible moral monster, she began to take a profound interest in it and its behavior.
"What will you be doing next?" she would inquire of it quaintly, "what will you be doing next, Other-Sheila?"
She did in fact credit this newly realized self of hers with a very distinct and separate personality. All her caprices, her unexpected and unexplainable impulses, her mystic imaginings, she laid at its door, and in her fantastic name for it—"Other-Sheila"—she probably found the true name for something that the psychologists define far more clumsily.
But stung into sensitiveness by Ted's taunt about her queerness, she kept her discovery of Other-Sheila to herself. Not even to Mrs. Caldwell, who was a friend as well as a grandmother; not even to Peter, who was all the while feeding her eager young mind with food both wholesome and stimulating, and becoming, in his task, a comrade who rivalled Ted in her affections, did she confide the existence of this other self. With self-consciousness came the instinct of reserve—not a lack of frankness, but a kind of modesty of the soul.
She had passed her fifteenth birthday before Other-Sheila roused her to unrest. Until that time, the shadowy self dwelling deep within her, and every now and then flashing forth elusively just long enough to manifest its reality, had been a secret and delightful companion, one with whom she held animated conversations when alone, and from whose acquiescence to all her wishes and opinions she extracted considerable comfort.
"Other-Sheila," she would say to herself, "is the only person who always agrees with me." And then she would add, with a glint of whimsical humor in her gray eyes, "I reckon that's what an Other-Sheila is for!"