h was utterly bewildered. With her
inarticulate consciousness of the impropriety of emotion, naked, _in
public_! was the shyness of a child in meeting a stranger--for that
crying woman was practically a stranger. She wasn't the Bride--silent
and lovely! At Johnny's gate she said, briefly, "'Night!" and went on,
running--running in the dusk. When she reached the house, and found her
father and mother on the east porch, she was breathless, which accounted
for her brevity in saying that Maurice and Eleanor were coming--and she
was just starved! In the dining room, eating a very large supper, she
listened for the wheels of the wagon and reflected: "Why was Eleanor mad
at _me_? She was mad at Maurice, too. But most at me. Why?" She took an
enormous spoonful of sliced peaches, and stared blankly ahead of her.

Ten minutes later, hearing wheels grating on the gravel at the front
door, and Maurice's voice, subdued and apologetic, she pushed her chair
away from the table, rushed through the pantry and up the back stairs.
She didn't know why she fled. She only knew that she couldn't face
Eleanor, who would sit with Maurice while he bolted a supper for
which--though Edith didn't know it!--all appetite had gone. In her room
in the ell, Edith shut the door, and, standing with her back against it,
tried to answer her own question:

"Why was Eleanor mad?" But she couldn't answer it. Jealousy, as an
emotion, in herself or anybody else, was absolutely unknown to her.
She had probably never even heard the word--except in the Second
Commandment, or as a laughing reproach to old Rover--so she really did
not know enough to use it now to describe Eleanor's behavior. She only
said, "Maybe it's the nervous prostration? Well, I don't like her very
much. I'm glad she won't be at Fern Hill when I go there." To be a
Bride--and yet to cry before people! "Crying before people," Edith said,
"is just like taking off all your clothes before people--I don't care
how bad her nervous prostration is; it isn't nice! But why is she mad at
me? That isn't sense."

You can't run other people's feelings to cover, and try to find their
cause, without mental and moral development; all this analysis lessened
very visibly Edith's childishness; also, it made her rather rudely cold
to Eleanor, whose effort to reinstate herself in the glories of the
little girl's imagination only resulted in still another and entirely
new feeling in Edith's mind--contempt.

"If she