“Pete is worse than any of them,” Clara went on.  “After he comes back from the Clubhouse, he wants to sit up and write for an hour or two.  Oh, I get fairly desperate sometimes, sitting there listening to the eternal scratching of his pen.  I cannot understand his point of view, to save my life.  If I talk, it irritates him.  My very breathing annoys him; he cannot have me in the same room with him.  But if I leave the cabin, he can’t write a word.  He wants me near, always.  He says it’s the knowing I’m there that makes him feel like writing.  And then Sundays, if he isn’t writing, he’s painting.  I don’t mind his not being there in the daytime in a way because, of course, there’s always Peterkin.  But at night, when I’ve put Peterkin to bed I do want something different to happen.  As it is, I have to make a scene to get up any excitement.  I do it, too, without compunction.  When it gets to the point that I know I must scream or go crazy, I scream.  And I do a good job in screaming, too.”

“What would you like him to do, Clara?” Julia asked.

The petulant frown between Clara’s eyebrows deepened.  “I don’t know,” she said wearily.  “I don’t know what it is that I want to do; but I want to do something.  Peterkin is asleep and perfectly safe — and I feel like going somewhere.  Now, if I could fly, it would rest me so, to go for a long, long journey through the air.”  As she concluded, some new expression, some strange hardness of her maturity, melted; her face was for an instant the face of the old Clara.

Julia made no comment.

It was Chiquita who took it up.

“My husband talks enough.  In fact, he talks all the time.  But if I tire of his voice, I let myself fall asleep.  He never notices.  That is why I’ve grown so big.  Sometimes " — discontent dulled for an instant the slow fire of her slumberous eyes — " sometimes my life seems one long sleep.  If it weren’t for junior, I’d feel as if I weren’t quite alive.”

“Ralph talks a great deal,” Peachy said listlessly, “by fits and starts, and he takes me out when he comes home, if he happens to feel like walking himself.  He says, though, that it exhausts him having to help me along.  But it isn’t that I want particularly.  Often I want to go out alone.  I want to soar.  The earth has never satisfied me.  I want to explore the heights.  I want to explore them alone, and I want to explore them when the mood seizes me.  And I want to feel when I come back that I can talk about it or keep silent as he does.  But I must make my discoveries and explorations in my own way.  Ralph sometimes gives me long talks about astronomy — he seems to think that studying about the stars will quiet me.  One little flight straight up would mean more to me than all that talk.  Ralph does not understand it in me, and I cannot explain it to him.  And yet he feels exactly that way himself — he’s always going off by himself through unexplored trails on the island.  But he cannot comprehend how I, being a woman, should have the same desire.  Do you remember when our wings first began to grow strong and our people kept us confined, how we beat our wings against the wall — beat and beat and beat?  At times now, I feel exactly like that.  Why, sometimes I envy little Angela her wings.”