His face flared darkly red, and he put his disengaged hand up before his eyes. But in a moment he took it down and looked straight at her. “Yes, I am,” he said. “Look at me, honey, I don’t mind your knowin’ it. I _want_ for you to know. I want you to know just all I am. You’re the only person in all the world I could ever speak about it to, but I want you to know just the onery little feller I am. You’re my mother, an’ my sister--you’re what I am. I can’t keep nothing back from you. I want to lay my heart right out for you to see.” “I know--I understand,” she whispered. She accepted his fear simply and uncritically. His hand tightened upon hers desperately. “I’m just a coward, honey, just yeller. I’m afraid of the other fellers; they’ll guy the life out of me. I’ll be everybody’s goat, I know it. _She_ said I would, an’ it’s so. Maybe--maybe I can’t stand up to it any better than that Chapin boy. An’ I’m afraid of goin’ over an’ of gettin’ killed. I want for you to know it _all_--all I am! But--but it ain’t the first time I’ve stood up and made myself do things I was scared of. I’ve _got_ to go. Oh, Lord! Maybe I’ll pull through all right!” “Why do you have to go?” Julie cried suddenly, violently. Then like the breaking of a dam her words gushed out, tossing aside the mincing phraseology of her mother’s training, and reverting to the tongue of her mountain people. “What’s the world ever give you that you got to stand up now an’ maybe be killed for it? What’s folks ever done for you or for me that we got to please ’em now? Did they ever do anything for you? They never done one thing for me! My mother an’ my father was good to me--but they’re dead. An’ what’s other folks ever done for us? Ain’t they always crowded us out into the cold an’ slammed the door in our faces? They never let us in to life. They never even knowed we was there. Or if they took notice of us, it was just to knock us out er the road, er maybe stamp on us, or wrench us ’round the way they wanted us to go.” “That’s God’s truth,” he said slowly. “Ain’t it always been so?” she rushed on. “Did they ever let you be a real person? Wasn’t they always slappin’ you out into the cold? Even when you was a child, did the other children ever let you in, an’ play with you like they did one another? They never did me.” “They never did me either,” he answered. “I was the outsider. They always picked on me.”