LITMIR.BIZ

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frightened. But the pine trunks were wonderful to her, and distinct. He packed his box and rose. Suddenly he looked at her.

      “Why are you always sad?” he asked her.

      “Sad!” she exclaimed, looking up at him with startled, wonderful brown eyes.

      “Yes,” he replied. “You are always sad.”

      “I am not—oh, not a bit!” she cried.

      “But even your joy is like a flame coming off of sadness,” he persisted. “You're never jolly, or even just all right.”

      “No,” she pondered. “I wonder—why?”

      “Because you're not; because you're different inside, like a pine-tree, and then you flare up; but you're not just like an ordinary tree, with fidgety leaves and jolly—”

      He got tangled up in his own speech; but she brooded on it, and he had a strange, roused sensation, as if his feelings were new. She got so near him. It was a strange stimulant.

      Then sometimes he hated her. Her youngest brother was only five. He was a frail lad, with immense brown eyes in his quaint fragile face—one of Reynolds's “Choir of Angels”, with a touch of elf. Often Miriam kneeled to the child and drew him to her.

      “Eh, my Hubert!” she sang, in a voice heavy and surcharged with love. “Eh, my Hubert!”

      And, folding him in her arms, she swayed slightly from side to side with love, her face half lifted, her eyes half closed, her voice drenched with love.

      “Don't!” said the child, uneasy—“don't, Miriam!”

      “Yes; you love me, don't you?” she murmured deep in her throat, almost as if she were in a trance, and swaying also as if she were swooned in an ecstasy of love.

      “Don't!” repeated the child, a frown on his clear brow.

      “You love me, don't you?” she murmured.

      “What do you make such a FUSS for?” cried Paul, all in suffering because of her extreme emotion. “Why can't you be ordinary with him?”

      She let the child go, and rose, and said nothing. Her intensity, which would leave no emotion on a normal plane, irritated the youth into a frenzy. And this fearful, naked contact of her on small occasions shocked him. He was used to his mother's reserve. And on such occasions he was thankful in his heart and soul that he had his mother, so sane and wholesome.

      All the life of Miriam's body was in her eyes, which were usually dark as a dark church, but could flame with light like a conflagration. Her face scarcely ever altered from its look of brooding. She might have been one of the women who went with Mary when Jesus was dead. Her body was not flexible and living. She walked with a swing, rather heavily, her head bowed forward, pondering. She was not clumsy, and yet none of her movements seemed quite THE movement. Often, when wiping the dishes, she would stand in bewilderment and chagrin because she had pulled in two halves a cup or a tumbler. It was as if, in her fear and self-mistrust, she put too much strength into the effort. There was no looseness or abandon about her. Everything was gripped stiff with intensity, and her effort, overcharged, closed in on itself.

      She rarely varied from her swinging, forward, intense walk. Occasionally she ran with Paul down the fields. Then her eyes blazed naked in a kind of ecstasy that frightened him. But she was physically afraid. If she were getting over a stile, she gripped his hands in a little hard anguish, and began to lose her presence of mind. And he could not persuade her to jump from even a small height. Her eyes dilated, became exposed and palpitating.

      “No!” she cried, half laughing in terror—“no!”

      “You shall!” he cried once, and, jerking her forward, he brought her falling from the fence. But her wild “Ah!” of pain, as if she were losing consciousness, cut him. She landed on her feet safely, and afterwards had courage in this respect.

      She was very much dissatisfied with her lot.

      “Don't you like being at home?” Paul asked her, surprised.

      “Who would?” she answered, low and intense. “What is it? I'm all day cleaning what the boys make just as bad in five minutes. I don't WANT to be at home.”

      “What do you want, then?”

      “I want to do something. I want a chance like anybody else. Why should I, because I'm a girl, be kept at home and not allowed to be anything? What chance HAVE I?”

      “Chance of what?”

      “Of knowing anything—of learning, of doing anything. It's not fair, because I'm a woman.”

      She seemed very bitter. Paul wondered. In his own home Annie was almost glad to be a girl. She had not so much responsibility; things were lighter for her. She never wanted to be other than a girl. But Miriam almost fiercely wished she were a man. And yet she hated men at the same time.

      “But it's as well to be a woman as a man,” he said, frowning.

      “Ha! Is it? Men have everything.”

      “I should think women ought to be as glad to be women as men are to be men,” he answered.

      “No!”—she shook her head—“no! Everything the men have.”

      “But what do you want?” he asked.

      “I want to learn. Why SHOULD it be that I know nothing?”

      “What! such as mathematics and French?”

      “Why SHOULDN'T I know mathematics? Yes!” she cried, her eye expanding in a kind of defiance.

      “Well, you can learn as much as I know,” he said. “I'll teach you, if you like.”

      Her eyes dilated. She mistrusted him as teacher.

      “Would you?” he asked.

      Her head had dropped, and she was sucking her finger broodingly.

      “Yes,” she said hesitatingly.

      He used to tell his mother all these things.

      “I'm going to teach Miriam algebra,” he said.

      “Well,” replied Mrs. Morel, “I hope she'll get fat on it.”

      When he went up to the farm on the Monday evening, it was drawing twilight. Miriam was just sweeping up the kitchen, and was kneeling at the hearth when he entered. Everyone was out but her. She looked round at him, flushed, her dark eyes shining, her fine hair falling about her face.

      “Hello!” she said, soft and musical. “I knew it was you.”

      “How?”

      “I knew your step. Nobody treads so quick and firm.”

      He sat down, sighing.

      “Ready to do some algebra?” he asked, drawing a little book from his pocket.

      “But—”

      He could feel her backing away.

      “You said you wanted,” he insisted.

      “To-night, though?” she faltered.

      “But I came on purpose. And if you want to learn it, you must begin.”

      She took up her ashes in the dustpan and looked at him, half tremulously, laughing.

      “Yes, but to-night! You see, I haven't thought of it.”

      “Well, my goodness! Take the ashes and come.”

      He went and sat on the stone bench in the back-yard, where the big milk-cans were standing, tipped up, to air. The men were in the cowsheds. He could hear the little sing-song of the milk spurting into the pails. Presently she came, bringing some big greenish apples.

      “You know you like them,” she said.

      He took a bite.

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