Obediently I ran to the front fence, though my throat felt sick when I saw them coming. “Have an apple core? Give us some of them flowers. Shut your eyes so’s you’ll look just like you was dead.” These were the things that they always said. Something kept telling me that I ought not to tell them about my lady, but I was always wanting to win their approval and to let them know that I was really more one of them than they thought. So I disobeyed, and I told them. Mysteriously, breathlessly I led them back to the tree; and feeling all the time that I was not keeping faith, I pointed her out to them. I showed them just where to look, beginning with the skirts, which surely anybody could see.... I used often to dream that a crowd of apish, impish little folk was making fun of me, and that afternoon I lived it, standing out alone against those four who fell to instant jeering. If they had stooped and put their hands on their knees and hopped about making faces, it would have been no more horrible to me than their laughter. It held for me all the sense of bad dreams, and then of waking alone, in the middle of the night. The worst was that I could find no words to make them know. I could only keep saying, “She is there, she is there, she is there.” By some means I managed not to cry, not even when they each broke a great branch of blossoms from the Eating-apple tree and ran away, flat-footed, down the path; not indeed until the gate had slammed and I turned back to the tree and saw that my lady had gone.
There was no doubt about it. Here were no longer soft skirts, but only flowery branches where the sunlight thickened and the bees drowsed. My lady was gone. Try as I might, I could not bring her back. So she had been mocking me too! Otherwise, why had she let me see her so that I should be laughed at, and then herself vanished? Yet, even then, I remember that I did not doubt her, or for a moment cease to believe that she was really there; only I felt a kind of shame that I could see her, and that the others could not see her. I had felt the same kind of shame before, never when I was alone, but always when I was with people. We played together well enough,—Pom, pom, pullaway, Minny-minny motion, Crack-the-whip, London Bridge, and the rest, save that I could not run as fast as nearly everybody. But the minute we stopped playing and talked, then I was always saying something so that the same kind of shame came over me.
I saw Delia crossing the street. In one hand she held two cookies which she was biting down sandwich-wise, and in the other hand two cookies, as yet unbitten. The latter she shook at me.
“I knew I’d see you,” she called resentfully. “I says I’d give ’em to you if I saw you, and if I didn’t see you—”
She left it unfinished at a point which gave no doubt as to whose cookies they might have been had I not been offensively about. But the cookies were fresh, and I felt no false delicacy. However, after deliberation, I ate my own, one at a time, rejecting the sandwich method.
“It lasts them longest,” I explained.
“The other way they bite thicker,” Delia contended.
“Your teeth don’t taste,” I objected scientifically.
Delia opened her eyes. “Why, they do too!” she cried.
I considered. I had always had great respect for the strange chorus of my teeth, and I was perfectly ready to regard them as having independent powers.