“Well, then, I walked along the brook and sentimentalised in the dappled sunlight of the yellowing woods. The blue-jays were like winged sapphires everywhere; squirrels made a most prodigious noise among dry leaves. In a hemlock I saw a large owl sitting.
“I took home a huge sheaf of asters. Even in my arms butterflies hovered about the gold and blue blossoms.
“I shall leave here soon. My stepmother and my half-brothers are kind to me. My father, too, in his own way.
“But I shall not come to Whitewater Farms again.
“In spite of kindness, I am not wanted. Finally, I have come to understand that.
“I am not really welcome; I am pleasantly endured. My people have nothing in common with me. It always has been so. I seem to have been born an outsider. I still am. They can’t help it; nor can I. There seems to be no bond, no tie, no natural obligation of blood, none of custom, to hold me here.... It is a lonely feeling. But it has been mine from earliest recollection.
“Often I used to wonder why I had no intimate affection for this house, for the place—trees, hills, woods.
“I love them—but as one who passes that way often, and becomes fond of a neighbour’s house and trees.
“Never have they, in any intimate sense, been mine, or part of me.... Not even my old dresses, my few books, my fewer child’s toys, have I ever truly considered mine—lacking, perhaps, the love that should have been the gift,—the spirit, Barry—which left me only with the substance—a lonely, lonely child.