“Well, I do miss Towser,” Marcia thoughtfully acknowledged, but she could go no further in comprehending her sister’s delicate and doubtless more mature emotions. In less triste moments, Marcia studied her for other signs of the strange difference between them, a difference she longed to rectify, if she could only understand it. Sometimes she begged for a demonstration for the benefit of her playmates.

“Show Georgie how you cry when you’re homesick,” Marcia would urge, but Lena would only be snappish and run away, blushing.

Marcia was five years old now, fifteen months younger than Lena, but she was half an inch taller because she took after the Willards instead of the Reeds. It was an understood thing that Lena was the pretty one, with her yellow curls and rosy cheeks, but Marcia was proud of having bigger feet so she got new shoes first, and the fact that she could hold her breath longer. She did admire Lena’s social poise, her not being afraid of boys but stalking past them, nose calmly in air, and she desperately envied Lena’s birthmark, a strawberry basket on her neck, caused, it was said, by her mother’s passion for strawberries. Lena, for her part, was envious of grown-up solicitude over Marcia’s health, remarks that she looked “peaked” and sickly. Marcia had a memory, too, though this was a matter of wonder and pride to Lena more than envy. Marcia could remember everything that ever happened, almost from her first tooth. She could remember knowing what people were saying before she could talk and she could remember bitterly the humiliation of being helpless. She remembered being carried in her mother’s arms to a family reunion and given ice cream for the first time. She had cried over its being too cold and her mother said, “Here, Baby, I’ll put it on a stove to warm it.” Any fool of even less than two could see it was a table and not a stove, but for some philosophic reason Baby Marcia decided to let the thing pass without protest. If her mother wanted to think a table was a stove, she would just have to wait for a bigger vocabulary to argue the matter. This was the beginning of a series of disillusioning experiences with adult intelligence, and the recurrent question of whether adults were playing a constant game of insulting trickery, or whether they just didn’t know much. Lena was gravely shocked by Marcia’s spoken doubts, so Marcia kept her thoughts to herself.

Lena went to Primary School in London Junction now and no longer considered Marcia a fit companion in public, but walked home with a girlfriend her own age named Mary Evelyn Stewart. The double name was very fascinating so Marcia changed her own name to Marcia Lily and Lena took the name of Lena Gladys. They tried to make Florrie use her full elegant name of Florence Adeline, but with her customary obstinacy she yelled defiantly, “Me Florrie! Me Florrie!”

“All right, then, be Florrie,” Lena Gladys said contemptuously. “But Mary Evelyn and I won’t ride you around any more in your go-cart after school.”