SOLITUDE

AMONG the pictures that I see when I look back into the past, is the one

where I, a sullen, egotistic person nine years old, stood quite alone in the

world. To be sure, there were father and mother in the house, and there

were the other children, and not one among them knew I was alone. The

world certainly would not have regarded me as friendless or orphaned. There

was nothing in my mere appearance, as I started away to school in my clean

ginghams, with my well-brushed hair, and embroidered school-bag, to lead

any one to suppose that I was a castaway. Yet I was—I had discovered this

fact, hidden though it might be from others.

I was no longer loved. Father and mother loved the other children; but not

me. I might come home at night, fairly bursting with important news about

what had happened in class or among my friends, and try to relate my little

histories. But did mother listen? Not at all. She would nod like a mandarin

while I talked, or go on turning the leaves of her book, or writing her letter.

What I said was of no importance to her.

Father was even less interested. He frankly told me to keep still, and went

on with the accounts in which he was so absurdly interested, or examined

"papers"—stupid-looking things done on legal cap, which he brought home

with him from the office. No one kissed me when I started away in the

morning; no one kissed me when I came home at night. I went to bed

unkissed. I felt myself to be a lonely and misunderstood child—perhaps even

an adopted one.

Why, I knew a little girl who, when she went up to her room at night, found

the bedclothes turned back, and the shade drawn, and a screen placed so as

to keep off drafts. And her mother brushed her hair twenty minutes by the

clock each night, to make it glossy; and then she sat by her bed and sang

softly till the girl fell asleep.

I not only had to open my own bed, but the beds for the other children, and

although I sometimes felt my mother's hand tucking in the bedclothes round

me, she never stooped and kissed me on the brow and said, "Bless you, my

child." No one, in all my experience, had said, "Bless you, my child." When

the girl I have spoken of came into the room, her mother reached out her

arms and said, before everybody, "Here comes my dear little girl." When I

came into a room, I was usually told to do something for somebody. It was

"Please see if the fire needs more wood," or "Let the cat in, please," or "I'd

like you to weed the pansy bed before supper-time.