WHAT ails Sara?" Tom Marcey wanted to know. Alice told him. "She's cranky again," said he lightly; but Alice had got to the point where she could not lightly dismiss the doings of her children with explanations like this. The impassioned desires of Sara came from somewhere. They had their reasons, and once a mother has come to the point where she knows everything in the world of childhood has a possibly important reason, she is lost. Forever after she will spend her time following blind and elusive trails in her children's minds. Forevermore she will try and find out the why of things. There is no search more fascinating in all this world, and scarcely one more difficult. How can one find out why? They do not know themselves.
From the depths of Sara's nature there arose this necessity of putting to bed everything that she could lay her hands on. Laurie and Tom thought it mere perversity, a desire to make trouble for grown-up people, and shoved it from their minds with the amiable explanation that Sara was in her crankiness trying to provoke them. But these impassioned desires of childhood, Alice knew, came from other sources. Like any real need of the human mind opposition caused it to burn with a fiercer flame. Any real passion, like love, like religion, craves martyrdom, so Sara would not have been averse to having her passion for putting the furniture to bed quickened by suffering.
Perhaps, Alice thought, it was a welling up of the
