Then there came the moment when Mother sat beside me.
“Don’t ask God for anything,” she always said to me. “Just shut your eyes and think of his lovingness being here, close, close, close—breathing with you like your breath. Don’t ask him for anything.”
But that night I scrambled into bed.
“Not to-night, Mother,” I said.
She never said anything when I said that. She kissed me and went away.
Then!
There I was, face to face with it at last. What was it that had told me to eat the bear and the strawberry? What was it that had told me that these must not be eaten? What had made me obey one and not the other? Who was it that spoke to me like that?
I shut my eyes and thought of the voice that had told me to eat, and it felt like the sore feeling in me and like the lump in my throat, and like unhappiness.
I thought of the other gentle voice that had spoken and had kept speaking and at last had gone away—and suddenly, with my eyes shut, I was thinking of something like lovingness, close, close, breathing with me like my breath.
So now I have made a story for that night. It is late, I know. But perhaps it is not too late.