I turned to Delia for a second. When she went, I looked back for my lady—but she had gone. Only—now I did not try to bring her back. Neither did I doubt her, even then. But there came back a certain loneliness that I had felt before, only never so much as now. Why was it that the others could not see?
I lay face downward in the grass under the tree. There were other things like this lady that I had been conscious of, which nobody else seemed to care about. Sometimes I had tried to tell. More often I had instinctively kept still. Now slowly I thought that I understood: I was different. Different from the whole world. Did I not remember how, when I walked on the street, groups of children would sometimes whisper: “There she is—there she is!” Or, “Here she comes!” I had thought, poor child, that this would be because my hair was long, like little Eva’s in the only play that most of us had seen. But now I thought I knew what they had known and I had not known: That I was different.
I dropped my face in the crook of my arm and cried—silently, because to cry aloud seemed always to have about it a kind of nakedness; but I cried sorely, pantingly, with aching throat, and tried to think it out.
What was this difference? I had heard them say in the house that my head was large, my hair too long to let me be healthy; and the four Eversleys always wanted me to shut my eyes so that I should look dead. But it was something other than these. Maybe—I shall never forget the grip of that fear—maybe I was not human. Maybe I was Adopted. I had no clear idea what Adopted meant, but my impression was that it meant not to have been born at all. That was it. I was like the apple-blossoms that would never be apples. I was just a Pretend little girl, a kind of secret one, somebody who could never, never be the same as the rest.
I turned from that deep afternoon and ran for the wood-pile where I had a hiding-place. Down the path I met Mother and clung to her.
“Mother, Mother!” I sobbed. “Am I adopted?”
“No, dear,” she said seriously. “You are mine. What is it?”
“Promise me I’m not!” I begged.
“I promise,” she said. “Who has been talking to you? You little lamb, come in the house,” she added. “You’re tired out, playing.”
I went with her. But the moment had entered me. I was not like the rest. I said it over, and every time it hurt. There is no more passionate believer in democracy than a child.