Page:The Star in the Window.pdf/58

struck me," she raced on, "as wicked for a person to do what he wanted, just so 'twas self-respecting and didn't hurt anybody else. I wanted to see the world. Why, when I was a child, whenever I stood up in school and bounded a country, the very names—the Arctic Ocean, the Caribbean Sea, the Coral, the Gulf of Guinea, the Bay of Bengal—called to me. Maps would get my cheeks all hot with excitement, tugging at my heartstrings. The bottoms of my feet fairly itched to press the ground of lavender Austria some day, green Turkey, pink India, lemon-colored China. I wanted to taste the river Jordan, touch the walls of Jerusalem, smell India, see a monkey hanging by his tail from a tropical tree, hear a dozen of them chatter in an African jungle. And I have—I have! But it hasn't been by surrender. My mother died, and left me at fifteen a penniless orphan. I was sent to my Uncle John's to help with the housework, for my board, but I didn't submit myself long to any such heaven's will as that! I went down and worked at the mills with the foreigners, and paid somebody else to do my chores at Uncle John's, and laid by two dollars a week in the bank. Oh, I didn't submit myself to anything that stood in the way of my ambition—not even an infirmity I had of making a noise like a foghorn whenever I blew my nose. I had an inspiration to advertise as a travelling companion, when, after two years at the mills I'd saved up only a little over seventy-five dollars. It took me a long while to land my first job, but finally a lady in Union, who was going to Florida for the winter, engaged me. I was terribly excited. I'd never even been across the state-line. But on the second day in New York she told