For a minute I looked at her as if she were a Mrs. Jorley’s wax-works, and then I made a bow like I make in charades.

“We understand,” I said.  “And we will not come again.  We’ve heard a good many people in Yorkburg have been once and no more.”  And I bowed again and walked past her like she was a stage character, which she was, being a pretence and nothing else.

Mad?  I tell you, I was Martha for a week, and then I saw, real sudden, how silly I was to let a bulgarian make me mad.

But if I’m ever expected to love anything like that, it will be expecting too much of Mary Cary, mostly Martha, for she isn’t an enemy.  She’s just a make-believe of something she wasn’t born into being and don’t know how to make herself.  She don’t agree with my nature, and if I had a parlor she couldn’t come into it either.  She could not.

IV

THE STEPPED-ON AND THE STEPPERS

I don’t believe I ever have written anything about my first years at this Asylum.  I am naturally a wandering person.  Well, I was happy.  I know I’ve said that before, but Miss Katherine says that’s one of the few things you can say often.

I had a kitten, and a chicken which I killed by mistake.  I took it to the pump to wash it, and it lost its breath and died.  I still put flowers on the place where its grave was.

It was my first to die.  I have lost many others since:  a cat, and a rabbit, and a rooster called Napoleon because he was so strutty and domineering to his wives.  I didn’t put up anything to his grave.  I didn’t think the hens would like it.  They just despised him.

Then there were the remains of Rebecca Baker.  She was of rags, with button eyes and no teeth, just marks for them; but I loved her very much.  I kept her as long as there was anything to hold her by; but after legs and arms went, and the back of her head got so thin from lack of sawdust that she had neuralgia all the time, I found her dead one morning, and buried her at once.

I loved Rebecca Baker:  not for looks, but for comfort.  I could talk to her without fear of her telling.  She always knew how hungry I was, and how I hated oatmeal without sugar, and she never talked back.

During the years from three to nine I lived just mechanical, except on the inside.  I got up to a bell and cleaned to a bell, and sat down to eat to a bell; rose to a bell, went to school to a bell, came out to a bell, worked to a bell, sewed to a bell, played to a bell, said my prayers to a bell, got in bed to a bell, and the next day and every day did the same thing over to the same old bell.

But when I marry my children’s father there are to be no bells in the house we live in.  Only buttons, with no particular time to be pressed.

We go to church to a bell, too; that, is to Sunday-school.  We always go to St. John’s Sunday-school—­Episcopal.  The man who left this place put it in his will that we had to, but we go to all the other churches.  Episcopal the first Sunday, Methodist the second, Presbyterian the third, and Baptist the fourth, and when we get through we begin all over again.