Sensing from the beginning that she was alien, she accepted it, as she accepted herself. She took what she felt and saw in her own way. The older she grew the more she was pressed to leave or reject her true self as she knew it and to accept the world about her the way its other inhabitants accepted it. She knew they were wrong, but who can fight alone and unfriended when laughter and love, or professed love, are used to bring one into line with the others?

As a baby Selma had seen ghosts and strangers wherever she looked, and no face or eye that recognized and accepted her as she was. No one was cruel, but no one understood her. She had no social manner, and most people have, or affect to have it, even in infancy. The majority are born with a talent and taste for adapting. Selma was not.

At the very first she was suspected of being “simple.” She stared back wonderingly at those who picked her up and smiled put-on smiles and jounced her and pulled her dress aside to look at her small, perfectly formed hands and feet, that even in her infancy did not twitch and clutch like most babies’, but were still when exposed, like birds surprised to caution.

She took interest and pleasure in things without needing to share or to perform her reactions. Warm sunlight, the touch of soft cloth soothed her. The chatter of birds absorbed her as if she knew their language. The trickle of water on a hand was pleasure. In early terrorizing Buttercup, she assured herself as much privacy as an infant can have.

Pauline failed of acceptance in the opposite way. Losing, or perhaps suppressing, the distrust her eyes had early evidenced, the reaching, clutching baby fists described her temperament. Perhaps it had to do with her circumstance. Born in summer, she was in her early months always dressed lightly, although never left naked as some babies were. She knew air and sun on her skin, and the touch of other skin on hers. Her hands opened; her feet twitched obligingly. Her amiability at first charmed, then bored by its excess.

Lovey played with her, but never lost herself in the child. She always remembered when it was time to do something else. Deborah pronounced her a good-natured baby, held her, bobbing her playfully up and down in the air until she cried, then passed her on to Buttercup’s hands.