"Mother's on her honeymoon. She went away a week ago in a state of
self-conscious happiness that left Grandfather and Grandmother snappy
and disagreeable. She will be away four months, and every weekly letter
that comes from her will make this place more and more unbearable and
me more restless and dangerous. I could get myself invited away. Enid
would have me and give me a wonderful time. She has four brothers.
Fanny has begged me to stay with her in Boston for the whole of the
spring and see and do everything, which would be absolutely heaven. And
you know everybody in New York and could make life worth living."

"But Grandfather won't let me go. He likes to see me about the house,
he says, and I read the papers to him morning and evening. It does me
good, he considers, to 'make a sacrifice and pay deference to those
whose time is almost up.' So here I am, tied to the shadows, a prisoner
till Mother comes back--a woman of eighteen forced to behave like a
good little girl treated as if I were still content to amuse myself
with dolls and picture books! But the fire is smolderin Alice, and one
fine day it will burst into flame."

A shaft of sunlight found its way through the branches of a chestnut
tree and danced suddenly upon the envelope into which Joan had sealed
up this little portion of her overcharged vitality. Through the open
windows of her more than ample room with its Colonial four-post bed,
dignified tallboys, stiff chairs and anemic engravings of
early-Victorianism, all the stir and murmur of the year's youth came to
Joan.

If her eyes had not been turned inward and her ears had not been tuned
only to catch her own natural complaints, this chatter of young things
would have called her out to laugh and tingle and dance in the haunted
wood and cry out little incoherent welcomes to the children of the
earth. Something of the joy and emotion of that mother-month must have
stirred her imagination and set her blood racing through her young
body. She felt the call of youth and the urge to play. She sensed the
magnetic pull of the voice of spring, but when, with her long brown
lashes wet with impatient tears, she went to the window and looked out
at the green spread of lawn and the yellow-headed daffodils, it seemed
more than ever to her that she was peering through iron bars into the
playground of a school to which she didn't belong. She was
Joan-all-alone, she told herself, and added, with that touch of
pi