Delia and Calista and Margaret Amelia and Betty Rodman I loved with devotion. And Mary Elizabeth I likewise loved with devotion. Therefore, the fact that my four friends would not, in the language of the wise and grown world, “receive” Mary Elizabeth was to me bitter and unbelievable.  
This astounding situation, more than intimated on the day of the picnic, had its confirmation a few days after the advent of Mary Elizabeth in the New Family, when the six of us were seated on the edge of the board walk before our house. It was the middle of a June afternoon, a joyous, girlish day, with sun and wind in that feminine mood which is the frequent inheritance of all created things.
 
“I could ’most spread this day on my bread like honey, and eat it up, and not know the difference,” said Mary Elizabeth, idly. “The queen’s honey—the queen’s honey—the174 queen’s honey,” she repeated luxuriously, looking up into the leaves.
 
Delia leaned forward. It particularly annoyed her to have Mary Elizabeth in this mood.
 
“One, two, three, four, five of us,” Delia said, deliberately omitting Mary Elizabeth as, for no reason, she counted us.
 
Mary Elizabeth, released from tasks for an hour or two before time to “help with the supper,” gave no sign that she understood, save that delicate flush of hers which I knew.
 
“Yes,” she assented lazily, “one, two, three, four, five of us—” and she so contrived that five was her own number, and no one could tell whom of us she had omitted.
 
“Let’s play something,” I hurriedly intervened. “Let’s play Banquet.”
 
Action might have proved the solvent, but I had made an ill-starred choice. For having selected the rectangle of lawn where the feast was to be spread, Mary Elizabeth promptly announced that she had never heard of a banquet for five people, and that we must have more.
 
“We’ve got six,” corrected Delia, unwarily.
 
“Five,” Mary Elizabeth persisted tranquilly,175 “and it’s not enough. We ought to have thirty.”
 
“Where you going to get your thirty?” demanded the exasperated Delia.
 
“Why,” said Mary Elizabeth, “that’s always easy!” And told us.
 
The king would sit at the head, with his prime minister and a lord or two. At the foot would be the queen with her principal ladies-in-waiting (at this end, so as to leave room for their trains). In between would be the fool, the discoverer of the new land, the people from the other planets, us, and the animals.
 
“‘The animals!’” burst out Delia. “Whoever heard of animals at the table?”
 
Oh, but it was the animals that the banquet was for. They were talking animals, and everyone was scrambling to entertain them, and every place in which they ate they changed their shapes and their skins.
 
“I never heard of such a game,” said Delia, outright, already sufficiently grown-up to regard this as a reason.
 
“Let’s not play it,” said Margaret Amelia Rodman, languidly, and, though Delia had the most emphasis among us, Margaret Amelia was176 our leader, and we abandoned the game. I cannot recall why Margaret Amelia was our leader, unless it was because she had so many hair-ribbons and, when we had pin fairs, always came with a whole paper, whereas the rest of us merely had some collected in a box, or else rows torn off. But I suppose that we must have selected her for some potentiality; or else it was that a talent for tyranny was hers, since this, like the habit of creeping on all fours and other survivals of prehistoric man, will often mark one of the early stages of individual growth.
 
This time Calista was peace-maker.
 
“Let’s go for a walk,” she said. “We can do that before supper.”
 
“You’ll have to be back in time to help get supper, won’t you?” Delia asked Mary Elizabeth pointedly.
 
Again Mary Elizabeth was unperturbed, save for that faint flush.
 
“Yes,” she said, “I will. So let’s hurry.”
 
We ran toward the school ground, by common consent the destination for short walks, with supper imminent, as Prospect Hill was dedicated to real walks, with nothing pressing upon us.
 
“It says ‘Quick, quick, quick, quick,’” Mary177 Elizabeth cried, dragging a stick on the pickets of, so to say, a passing fence.
 
“Why, that’s nothing but the stick noise hitting on the fence noise,” Delia explained loftily.
 
“Which makes the loudest noise—the stick or the fence?” Mary Elizabeth put it to her.
 
“Why—” said Delia, and Mary Elizabeth and I both laughed, like little demons, and made our sticks say, “Quick, quick, quick, quick” as far as the big post, that was so like a man standing there to stop us.
 
“See the poor tree. The walk’s stepping on its feet!” cried Mary Elizabeth when we passed the Branchett’s great oak, that had forced up the bricks of the walk. (They must already have been talking of taking it down, that hundred-year oak, to preserve the dignity of the side-walk, for they did so shortly after.)
 
This time it was Margaret Amelia who revolted.
 
“Trees can’t walk,” she said. “There aren’t any feet there.”
 
I took a hand. “You don’t know sure,” I reminded her. “When it’s dark, maybe they do walk. I’ll ask it.”
 
178 By the time I had done whispering to the bark, Delia said she was going to tell her mother. “Such lies,” she put it bluntly. “You’ll never write a book, I don’t care what you say. You got to tell the truth to write books.”
 
“Everybody that tells the truth don’t write a book,” I contended—but sobered. I wanted passionately to write a book. What if this business of pretending, which Delia called lies should be in the way of truthful book-writing? But the habit was too strong for me. In that very moment we came upon a huge new ant-hill.
 
“Don’t step on that ant-hill. See all the ants—they say to step over it!” I cried, and pushed Delia round it with some violence.
 
“Well—what makes you always so—religious!” she burst out, at the end of her patience.
 
I was still hotly denying this implication when we entered the school yard, and broke into running; for no reason, save that entrances and beginnings always made us want to run and shout.
 
The school yard, quite an ordinary place during school hours, became at the end of school a place no longer to be shunned, but wholly179 desirable. Next to the wood yard, it was the most mysterious place that we knew. In the school yard were great cords of wood, suitable for hiding; a basement door, occasionally left open, from which at any moment the janitor might appear to drive us away; a band-stand, covered with names and lacking enough boards so that one might climb up without use of the steps; a high-board fence on which one always longed to walk at recess; a high platform from which one had unavailingly pined to jump; outside banisters down which, in school-time, no one might slide, trees which no one might climb, corner brick-work affording excellent steps, which, then, none might scale; broad outside window ledges on which none might sit, loose bricks in the walks ripe for the prying-up, but penalty attended; a pump on whose iron handle the lightest of us might ride save that, in school-time, this was forbidden too. In school-time this yard, so rich in possibilities, was compact of restrictions. None of these things might be done. Once a boy had been expelled for climbing on the schoolhouse roof; and thereupon his father, a painter by trade, had taken the boy to work with him, and when180 we saw him in overalls wheeling his father’s cart, we were told that that was what came of disobedience, although this boy might, easily no doubt, otherwise have become President of the United States.
 
But after school! Toward supper-time, or in vacation-time, we used to love to linger about the yard and snatch at these forbidden pleasures. That is, the girls loved it. The boys had long ago had them all, and were off across the tracks on new adventures unguessed of us.
 
If anybody found us here—we were promptly driven off. The principal did this as a matter of course, but the janitor had the same power and much more emphasis. If one of the board was seen passing, we hid behind everything and, as we were never clear just who belonged to the board, we hid when nearly all grown-folk passed. That the building and grounds were ours, paid for by our father’s taxes, and that the school officials and even the tyrannical janitor were town servants to help us to make good use of our own, no more occurred to us than it occurred to us to find a ring in the ground, lift it, and descend steps. Nor as much, for we were always looking for a ring to lift. To be sure, we might181 easily fall into serious mischief in this stolen use of our property; but that it was the function of one of these grown-ups, whom we were forever dodging, to be there with us, paid by the town to play with us, was as wild an expectation as that fairies should arrive with golden hoops and balls and wings. Wilder, for we were always expecting the fairies and, secretly, the wings.
 
That afternoon we did almost all these forbidden things—swings and seesaws and rings would have done exactly as well, only these had not been provided—and then we went to rest in the band-stand. Mary Elizabeth and I were feeling somewhat subdued—neither of us shone much in feats of skill, and here Delia and Margaret Amelia easily put us in our proper places. Calista was not daring, but she was a swift runner, and this entitled her to respect. Mary Elizabeth and I were usually the first ones caught, and the others were not above explaining to us frankly that this was why we preferred to play Pretend.
 
“Let’s tell a story—you start it, Mary Elizabeth,” I proposed, anxious for us two to return to standing, for in collaborations of this kind Mary182 Elizabeth and I frankly shone—and the wish to shine, like the wish to cry out, is among the primitive phases of individual growth.
 
“Let Margaret Amelia start it,” Delia tried to say, but already the story was started, Mary Elizabeth leaning far back, and beginning to braid and unbraid her long hair—not ri............