risen out of the trunk at the tree’s blossoming and was waiting for someone to greet her.
I struggled out of the swing and scrambled, breathless, back from the tree and looked where she should be. Already I knew her. Nearly, I knew the things that she would say to me—sometimes now I know the things that she would have said if we had not been interrupted.
The interruption came from four girls who lived, as I thought, outside my world,—for those were the little days when I did not yet know that this cannot be. They were the Eversley sisters, in full-skirted, figured calico, and they all had large, chapped hands and wide teeth and stout shoes. For a year they had been wont to pass our house on the way to the public school, but they had spoken to me no more than if I had been invisible—until the day when I had first entered school. After that, it was as if I had been born into their air, or thrown in the same cage, or had somehow become one of them. And I was in terror of them.
“Come ’ere once!” they commanded, their voices falling like sharp pebbles about the Apple-blossom lady and me.
