As experienced as Laurel was in certain of the world’s cruelties, and as mature in her calm manner of acceptance of whatever befell, she was amazingly young and innocent about many of the facts of life. Another antithesis. Much younger and much more innocent than the group of sophisticated little girls in her class at school. They were constantly spending days and nights with each other. Their intimacies led to easy discussions of all sorts of subjects. By the time they were twelve their activities out of school were closely resembling their mothers’. And their conversations, too. There were already conflicting invitations for every Saturday. Laurel could catch bits of conversation, now and then, as the various competing parties and entertainments were reviewed afterward, and their details discussed and criticized. Most of these girls became perceiving and canny little critics before they had finished playing dolls.

Laurel had no intimate friends, belonged in no group, joined in no daily gossipings. Her critical faculty went through no such course of training. She was still groping for the whys and wherefores of many of society’s verdicts long after her dolls were put away. Why had she no intimate friends? Why was she never asked to lunch, or to spend the night? Why had she been dropped from the Widow’s Mite Club which met Saturday mornings at Stephanie Holland’s? The worldly-wise little girls at school could have told her.

“It’s your mother.”

“What’s the matter with my mother?” she would have asked, surprised. Laurel thought her mother beautiful. The little girls would have shrugged and said, “Our mothers don’t ‘know her.’” With just the same shrug and inflection that had silenced them.

But Laurel never asked questions of the little girls. She passed through her childhood blindfolded, picking her way cautiously along, sensitive fingertips stretched out before her to avoid sharp corners and unyielding walls, clinging close to the protection of solitude and isolation.

There were other questions besides those connected with social values to which she didn’t know the answers, big questions like, what happens of dead people, and what God is like, and if He really hears you pray, and knows when a bird falls out of a nest, and where babies come from, and what doctors carry in their mysterious leather bags, and how kittens are born, and if there was ever actually a George Washington, and a Polyphemus, and a Jesus Christ, and Noah, and a Noah’s Ark, with a pair of every kind of animal there is in it, even a pair of mosquitoes, and why there had to be a pair.

Laurel never asked her mother questions about big things. She had discovered that her mother always changed the subject ever so quickly if she did. And once she had exclaimed, “Oh, my! Laurel, nice little girls don’t talk about things of that sort!”