On such occasions we never used the substantive, but merely “she.” It is worth being a child to have a sense of values so simple and unassailable as that.
“I’m going to do just this much. I can run all the way home,” I would answer; and I would begin on my house walls. But when these were done, and the rooms defined by moist sand partitions, there was all the fascination of its garden, with walks to be outlined with a shingle and sprays of Old Man and cedar to be stuck in for trees, and single stems of Fever-few and Sweet Alyssum or Flowering-currant and Bleeding-heart for the beds, and Catnip for the borders, and a chick from Old-Hen-and-Chickens for a tropical plant. We would be just begun on the stones for the fountain when some alien consciousness, some plucking at me, would recall the moment. And it would be half an hour past my hour.
“You were to come home at four o’clock,” Mother would say, when I reached there panting.
“Why did I have to come home at four o’clock?” I would finally give way to the sense of great and arbitrary wrong.
She always told me. I think that never in my life was I bidden to do a thing, or not to do it, “because I tell you to.” But never once did a time-reason seem sufficient. What were company, a nap-because-I-was-to-sit-up-late, or having-to-go-somewhere-else beside the reality of that house which I would never occupy, that garden where I would never walk?
“You can make it the next time you go to Delia’s,” Mother would say. But I knew that this was impossible. I might build another house, adventure in another garden; this one was forever lost to me.
“... only,” Mother would add, “you can not go to Delia’s for ...” she would name a period that yawned to me as black as the abyss. “... because you did not come home to-day when you were told.” And still time seemed to me indefinite. For now it appeared that I should never go to Delia’s again.
I thought about it more and more. What was this time that was laid on us so heavy? Why did I have to get up because it was seven o’clock, go to school because it was nine, come home from Delia’s because the clock struck something else ... above all, why did I have to go to bed because it was eight o’clock?
I laid it before my little council.
“Why do we have to go to bed because it’s bed-time?” I asked them. “Which started first—bed-time or us?”