A Rose of Womanhood

At once he saw that, in some way he could not understand, he had hurt her. She snatched her pencil and wrote, with such swiftness of motion and energy of expression that it almost seemed as if she had passionately exclaimed the words aloud,

“ No, no, no. I do not want to go any- where away from home. I do not want ever to see strangers or have them see me. I could not bear it.”

He thought that possibly the conscious- ness of her defect accounted for this. Yet she did not seem sensitive about her dumbness and made frequent casual ref- erences to it in her written remarks. Or perhaps it was the shadow on her birth. Yet she was so innocent that it seemed unlikely she could realize or understand the existence of such a shadow. Eric finally decided that it was merely the rather morbid shrinking of a sensitive child who had been brought up in an un-

wholesome and unnatural way. At last 103