as a mystery to her.

He would smash into her sensitive child's world
destructively. Her mother was lenient, careless The children
played about as they would all day. Ursula was
thoughtless--why should she remember things? If across the
garden she saw the hedge had budded, and if she wanted these
greeny-pink, tiny buds for bread-and-cheese, to play at teaparty
with, over she went for them.

Then suddenly, perhaps the next day, her soul would almost
start out of her body as her father turned on her, shouting:

"Who's been tramplin' an' dancin' across where I've just
sowed seed? I know it's you, nuisance! Can you find nowhere else
to walk, but just over my seed beds? But it's like you, that
is--no heed but to follow your own greedy nose."

It had shocked him in his intent world to see the zigzagging
lines of deep little foot-prints across his work. The child was
infinitely more shocked. Her vulnerable little soul was flayed
and trampled. Why were the foot-prints there? She had not
wanted to make them. She stood dazzled with pain and shame and
unreality.

Her soul, her consciousness seemed to die away. She became
shut off and senseless, a little fixed creature whose soul had
gone hard and unresponsive. The sense of her own unreality
hardened her like a frost. She cared no longer.

And the sight of her face, shut and superior with
self-asserting indifference, made a flame of rage go over him.
He wanted to break her.

"I'll break your obstinate little face," he said, through
shut teeth, lifting his hand.

The child did not alter in the least. The look of
indifference, complete glancing indifference, as if nothing but
herself existed to her, remained fixed.

Yet far away in her, the sobs were tearing her soul. And when
he had gone, she would go and creep under the parlour sofa, and
lie clinched in the silent, hidden misery of childhood.

When she crawled out, after an hour or so, she went rather
stiffly to play. She willed to forget. She cut off her childish
soul from memory, so that the pain, and the insult should not be
real. She asserted herself only. There was not nothing in the
world but her own self. So very soon, she came to believe in the
outward malevolence that was against her. And very early, she
learned that even her adored father was part of this
malevolence. And very early she learned to harden her soul in
resistance and denial of all that was outside her, harden
herself upon her own being.

S