There was a day when Mary Elizabeth and Delia and Calista and Betty and I sat under the Eating Apple tree and had no spirit to enter upon anything. Margaret Amelia was not with us, and her absence left us relaxed and without initiative; for it was not as if she had gone to the City, or to have her dress tried on, or her hair washed, or as if she were absorbed in any real occupation. Her absence was due to none of these things. Margaret Amelia was in disgrace. She was, in fact, confined in her room with every expectation of remaining there until supper time.  
“What’d she do?” we had breathlessly inquired of Betty when she had appeared alone with her tidings.
 
“Well,” replied Betty, “it’s her paper dolls and her button-house. She always leaves ’em around. She set up her button-house all over the rug in the parlour—you know,229 the rug that its patterns make rooms? An’ she had her paper dolls living in it. That was this morning—and we forgot ’em. And after dinner, while we’re outdoors, the minister came. And he walked into the buttons and onto the glass dangler off the lamp that we used for a folding-doors. And he slid a long ways on it. And he scrushed it,” Betty concluded resentfully. “And now she’s in her room.”
 
We pondered it. There was justice there, we saw that. But shut Margaret Amelia in a room! It was as ignominious as caging a captain.
 
“Did she cry?” we indelicately demanded.
 
“Awful,” said Betty. “She wouldn’t of cared if it had only been raining,” she added.
 
We looked hard at the sky. We should have been willing to have it rain to make lighter Margaret Amelia’s durance, and sympathy could go no further. But there was not a cloud.
 
It was Mary Elizabeth who questioned the whole matter.
 
“How,” said she, “does it do any good to shut her up in her room?”
 
We had never thought of this. We stared230 wonderingly at Mary Elizabeth. Being shut in your room was a part of the state of not being grown up. When you grew up, you shut others in their rooms or let them out, as you ruled the occasion to require. There was Grandmother Beers, for instance, coming out the door with scissors in her hands and going toward her sweet-pea bed. Once she must have shut Mother in her room. Mother!
 
Delia was incurably a defender of things as they are. Whenever I am tempted to feel that guardians of an out-worn order must know better than they seem to know, I remember Delia. Delia was born reactionary, even as she was born brunette.
 
“Why,” said she with finality, “that’s the way they punish you.”
 
Taken as a fact and not as a philosophy, there was no question about this.
 
“I was shut in one for pinching Frankie Ames,” I acknowledged.
 
“I was in one for getting iron-rust on my skirt,” said Calista, “and for being awful cross when my bath was, and for putting sugar on the stove to get the nice smell.”
 
“I was in one for telling a lie,” Betty admitted231 reluctantly. “And Margaret Amelia was in one for wading in the creek. She was in a downstairs one. And I took a chair round outside to help her out—but she wouldn’t do it.”
 
“Pooh! I was in one lots of times,” Delia capped it. And, as usual, we looked at her with respect as having experiences far transcending our own. “I’ll be in one again if I don’t go home and take care of my canary,” she added. “Mamma said I would.”
 
“Putting sugar on the stove isn’t as wicked as telling a lie, is it?” Mary Elizabeth inquired.
 
We weighed it. On the whole, we were inclined to think that it was not so wicked, “though,” Delia put in, “you do notice the sugar more.”
 
“Why do they shut you in the same way for the different wickeds?” Mary Elizabeth demanded.
 
None of us knew, but it was Delia who had the theory.
 
“Well,” she said, “you’ve got to know you’re wicked. It don’t make any difference how wicked. Because you stop anyhow.”
 
“No, you don’t,” Betty said decidedly,232 “you’re always getting a new thing to be shut in about. Before you mean to,” she added perplexedly.
 
Mary Elizabeth looked away at Grandmother Beers, snipping sweet-peas. Abruptly, Mary Elizabeth threw herself on the grass and stared up through the branches of the Eating Apple tree, and then laid her arms straight along her sides, and began luxuriously to roll down a little slope. The inquiry was too complex to continue.
 
“Let’s go see if the horse-tail hair is a snake yet,” she proposed, sitting up at the foot of the slope.
 
“I’ll have to do my canary,” said Delia, but she sprang up with the rest of us, and we went round to the rain-water barrel.
 
The rain-water barrel stood at the corner of the house, and reflected your face most satisfyingly, save that the eaves-spout got in the way. Also, you always inadvertently joggled the side with your knee, which set the water wavering and wrinkled away the image. At the bottom of this barrel invisibly rested sundry little “doll” pie-tins of clay, a bottle, a broken window-catch, a stray key, and the bowl of a233 soap-bubble pipe, cast in at odd intervals, for no reason. There were a penny doll and a marble down there too, thrown in for sheer bravado and bitterly regretted.
 
Into this dark water there had now been dropped, two days ago, a long black hair from the tail of Mr. Branchett’s horse, Fanny. We had been credibly informed that if you did this to a hair from a horse’s tail and left it untouched for twenty-four hours or, to be perfectly safe, for forty-eight hours, the result would inevitably be a black snake. We had gone to the Branchetts’ barn for the raw material and, finding none available on the floor, we were about to risk jerking it from the source when Delia had perceived what we needed caught in a crack of the stall. We had abstracted the hair, and duly immersed it. Why we wished to create a black snake, or what we purposed doing with him when we got him created, I cannot now recall. I believe the intention to have been primarily to see whether or not they had told us the truth—“they” standing for the universe at large. For my part, I was still smarting from having been detected sitting in patience with a handful of salt, by the mouse-hole234 in the shed, in pursuance of another recipe which I had picked up and trusted. Now if this new test failed....
 
We got an old axe-handle from the barn wherewith to probe the water. If, however, the black snake were indeed down there, our weapon, offensive and defensive, would hardly be long enough; so we substituted the clothes-prop. Then we drew cuts to see who should wield it, and the lot fell to Betty. Gentle little Betty turned quite pale with the responsibility, but she resolutely seized the clothes-prop, and Delia stood behind her with the axe-handle.
 
“Now if he comes out,” said Betty, “run for your lives. He might be a blue racer.”
 
None of us knew what a blue racer might be, but we had always heard of it as the fastest of all the creatures. A black snake, it seemed, might easily be a blue racer. As Betty raised the clothes-prop, I, who had instigated the experiment, weakened.
 
“Maybe he won’t be ready yet,” I conceded.
 
“If he isn’t there, I’ll never believe anything anybody tells me again—ever,” said Delia firmly.
 
235 The clothes-prop Betty plunged to the bottom, and lifted. No struggling black shape writhed about it. She repeated the movement, and this time we all cried out, for she brought up the dark discoloured rag of a sash of the penny doll, the penny doll clinging to it and immediately dropping sullenly back again. Grown brave, Betty stirred the water, and Delia, advancing, did the same with her axe-handle. Again and again these were lifted, revealing nothing. At last we faced it: No snake was there.
 
“So that’s a lie, too,” said Delia, brutally.
 
We stared at one another. I, as the one chiefly disappointed, looked away. I looked down the street: Mr. Branchett was hoeing in his garden. Delivery wagons were rattling by. The butter-man came whistling round the house. Everybody seemed so busy and so sure. They looked as if they knew why everything was. And to us, truth and justice and reason and the results to be expected in this grown-up world were all a confusion and a thorn.
 
As we went round the house, talking of what had happened, our eyes were caught by a picture236 which should have been, and was not, of quite casual and domestic import. On the side-porch of Delia’s house appeared her mother, hanging out Delia’s canary.
 
“Good-bye,” said Delia, briefly, and fared from us, running.
 
We lingered for a little in the front yard. In five minutes the curtains in Delia’s room stirred, and we saw her face appear, and vanish. She had not waved to us—there was no need. It had overtaken her. She, too, was “in her room.”
 
Delicacy dictated that we withdraw from sight, and we returned to the back yard. As we went, Mary Elizabeth was asking:
 
“Is telling a lie and not feeding your canary as wicked as each other?”
 
It seemed incredible, and we said so.
 
“Well, you get shut up just as hard for both of ’em,” Mary Elizabeth reminded us.
 
“Then I don’t believe any of ’em’s wicked,” said I, flatly. On which we came back to the garden and met Grandmother Beers, with a great bunch of sweet-peas in her hand, coming to the house.
 
“Wicked?” she said, in her way of soft237 surprise. “I didn’t know you knew such a word.”
 
“It’s a word you learn at Sunday school,” I explained importantly.
 
“Come over here and tell me about it,” she invited, and led the way toward the Eating Apple tree. And she sat down in the swing! Of course whatever difference of condition exists b............