"Oh, Fanny, I am sorry. She told me—something like that."
"You need not be. I suppose God chooses one's parents quite deliberately. Praise Him from Whom all blessings flow!" She smoothed out her black cloak over her ankles, raised her face again into the dwindling moonlight, and gently smiled at me. "I am glad I came, Midgetina, though it's suicidally cold. 'Pardi! on sent Dieu bien à son aise ici.' We are going to be great friends, aren't we?" Her eyes swept over me. "Would you like that?"
"Friends," indeed! and as if she had offered me a lump of sugar.
I gravely nodded. "But I must come to you. You can't come to me. No one has; except, perhaps, my mother—a little."
"Oh, yes," she replied cautiously, piercing her eyes at me, "that is a riddle. You must tell me about your childhood. Not that I love children, or my own childhood either. I had enough of that to last me a lifetime. I shan't pass it on; though I promise you, Midgetina, if I ever do have a baby, I will anoint its little backbone with the grease of moles, bats, and dormice, and make it like you. Was your mother——" she began again, after a pause of reflection. "Are you sorry, I mean, you aren't—you aren't——?"
Her look supplied the missing words. "Sorry that I am a midget, Fanny? People think I must be. But why? It is all I am, all I ever was. I am myself, inside; like everybody else; and yet, you know, not quite like everybody else. I sometimes think"—I laughed at the memory—"I was asking Dr Phelps about that. Besides, would you be—alone?"
"Not when I was alone, perhaps. Still, it must be rather odd, Miss Needle-in-a-Haystack. As for being alone"—once again our owl, if owl it was, much nearer now, screeched its screech in the wintry woods—"I hate it!"
"But surely," expostulated the wiseacre in me, "that's what we cannot help being. We even die alone, Fanny."
"Oh, but I'm going to help it. I'm not dead yet. Do you ever think of the future?"