How it all came about I know not. The queen and the slave encountered somewhere on the way. We met like two young puppies and snarled. The queen had a despotic notion of her own rights. She might snarl at me, but I had not the right to reply. If she struck me it was part of my punishment for being in her way, and my duty was to bear it.
I don't suppose she reasoned this way any more than the young puppy does when it flies at the throat of a mongrel it dislikes. Anyhow, she struck me. I was a proud, fierce little devil, and being two years her senior, I laid her low, with an ugly red stain on her white cheek.
As I do not remember how it began, so I do not recall how it ended. There is a dark blank of several hours--centuries it seemed to me--and I was in my cot sobbing myself to sleep, and telling myself that I could not bear it, and to-morrow would run away to my dear everyday parents.
Next morning I sullenly submitted to be dressed and taken down to breakfast. But the red-and-white bowl I ate my bread and milk out of no longer delighted my eye, and no amount of sugar could take the taste of bitterness out of that bread-and-milk. My stepfather came into the room, and looked at me in reproachful silence. Usually he kissed me and flung me up to the ceiling. But now that the poor miserable little worm had turned and struck the idol of the house, his own child, he had no kind word for me. He only knew of the affair what he had been told, and how many thoughtless big people can understand what goes on in the hearts of sore and lonely babies?
He may have noted the sadness of my face, but what did he know of the inward bruise, the hunger for love and sympathy, the malady of life that had begun to gnaw at my soul at an age when other little girls are out racing among the flowers in a universe bounded and heated and beautified by the love of mother and father?
Mrs. Clement must have been very busy, for she did not come to comfort me. Perhaps she, too, thought I was a fiend. But I was too proud to seek to explain matters to any one. If they wanted to believe I was bad, they might think I was as bad as ever they liked.
In my open-worked pinafore and little house slippers, bare-headed and bare-armed, I stole anxiously down-stairs. The baker was carrying in the bread, and the hall-door was open. This was my chance, and I seized it. Ah, there were the wide long streets, and however cruel the big people might be who went up and down them, at least they could not hurt me, for I did not belong to any of them.