Even me! There it was again! We are a frank family.
“If being responsible in tender years makes one hard and unfeeling when one grows up, I hope I wasn’t so,” I answered tartly.
Octavia said not another word, for she never will quarrel nor bicker. I wasn’t quite just. Octavia isn’t hard; she is only slow of perception and doesn’t readily put herself into other people’s places. Is not a lack of sympathy in good people often only a lack of imagination?
I was unjust, but I couldn’t express any contrition, my heart was so sore. I felt that there were, at this moment, heavy woes weighing upon the little sensitive spirit whose too keen ears took in every word of its elders, as few people realize that a child’s ears ever do.
On my way back I was tempted to stop at the schoolhouse and ask the teacher to allow Estelle to go home with me. It seemed cruel to let the little sore heart go uncomforted. But on second thought I refrained. In view of Dave’s misdemeanors I disliked to do anything that might make the children troublesome to their teachers. After all, childhood’s impressions were fleeting. The romp at recess might drive away all painful thoughts.
In fact when the child came home her face was bright, and I dismissed my misgivings. But that night I was awakened from sleep by a piteous little voice, close at my ear, that said, “Bashie, what is alien? I can’t sleep for thinking.”
I sprang up. “It’s a nasty, horrid word that means—that doesn’t mean much of anything, dearie!” I said, and I tried to draw her into bed and make her cuddle down by me, as she did sometimes when a whippoorwill—which she never liked—sang persistently on the roof, or a screech-owl—“nowls” she called them—hooted in the Balm of Gilead tree by her window. But she would not come. She stood there, in her little white nightgown and a moonbeam fell across her face and showed the hair all tossed back from her high forehead, as Loveday said she always pushed it back when she was full of naughtiness.
“It means—it means that Dave and I don’t belong here like the rest of you!” she said. “We’re the other family. The children at school say so! And we’re a trouble to you! We’re why Cyrus can’t go to college and be a minister. You said so yourself!”
I remembered that I did say so and I could have bitten my tongue out for my brutal carelessness.
When “the leaves of the judgment books unfold” and the countless stabs of careless tongues are revealed, we may be guiltily amazed to see how deeply they have pierced the children’s hearts.