Just then Bobbie Moon laid out flat on his back and kicked up his heels.  And Billie looked so disgusted, I stopped the story I was trying to tell.

“You ain’t talking sense,” he said.  “And I’m not going to listen any more.  An ant can’t eat an elephant in half an hour and leave no scraps.”  And he rolled over and began to fight Bobbie.

Sarah Sue and Myrtle, who’d been playing with their mother’s muff and tippet, got to fussing so about which should have her hat that Mrs. Moon, hearing it, jumped up, and I heard her say: 

“Mercy me!  Do you suppose she heard?”

I never was so glad of a fight in my life.  The more fuss was made the more chance there was of my being forgot, and presently I told Mrs. Moon I had to go home.  The boys said they didn’t care, my stories were rotten anyhow, and out I went and ran so fast I had such a pain in my side I could hardly breathe.

But I didn’t go in right away.  I couldn’t.  Inside of me everything was thumping:  “Mary Alden, your Mother; Mary Alden, your Mother; Mary Alden, your Mother.”  There was no other thought but that.

Presently I turned and went down to King Street, to where the Reagans live, and in the dark I stood there and shook my fist at my dead grandfather.  I hated him for treating my mother so.  Hated him!  Then I burst out crying, and cried so awful my eyes were nearly washed out.

There were twelve and a half years’ worth of tears that had to come out, and I let them come.  After they were out I felt lighter.

But sleep?  There wasn’t a blink of it for me all night.  I was so mixed up with new feelings that I was sick in my stomach, and my old conscience got so sanctimonious that if I could have spanked it I would.

I wasn’t eavesdropping; I know that’s nasty.  But forty times I’d been punished for speaking when I shouldn’t, and, besides, it was my duty to find myself.  They saw me, and then forgot.  If they hadn’t wanted me to know what they were saying, they shouldn’t have said it.

But that didn’t do my conscience any good.  I hate a conscience.  It’s always making you feel low down and disreputable.  I don’t believe I will say anything to my children about one, and let them have some peace.

For two days I didn’t have any.  Then I decided I’d wait until Miss Katherine came, and not say anything to her or to anybody about what I’d heard until I found out a little more about that remembrance in her face.  But the waiting for her is the longest wait I’ve ever waited through yet.

It certainly is queer what a surprise you are to yourself.  Before I knew that my mother and her father and his father and some other fathers behind him had lived in the Alden House, I would have given all I own, which isn’t much, just my body, to have known it.  And I guess I would have been that airy Martha couldn’t have lived with me, and would have had to take Mary to the pump to bring her senses back with water.  Mary is my best part, but at times she hasn’t half the common sense she needs, and frequently has a pride Martha has to attend to.