"Mary, I wish you could learn to talk without affectation. Telling Mrs. Waugh you 'looked like yourself'! If you could only manage to forget yourself." Your self? Your self? Why should you forget it? You had to remember. They would kill it if you let them. What had it done? What _was_ it that they should hate it so? It had been happy and excited about _them_, wondering what they would be like. And quiet, looking on and listening, in the strange, green-lighted, green-dark room, crushed by the gentle, hostile voices. Would it always have to stoop and cringe before people, hushing its own voice, hiding its own gesture? It crouched now, stung and beaten, hiding in her body that walked beside her mother with proud feet, and small lifted head. VII. Her mother turned at her bedroom door and signed to her to come in. She sat down in her low chair at the head of the curtained bed. Mary sat in the window-seat. "There's something I want to say to you." "Yes, Mamma." Mamma was annoyed. She tap-tapped with her foot on the floor. "Have you given up those absurd ideas of yours?" "What absurd ideas?" "You know what I mean. Calling yourself an unbeliever." "I _can't_ say I believe things I don't believe." "Have you tried?" "Tried?" "Have you ever asked God to help your unbelief?" "No. I could only do that if I didn't believe in my unbelief." "You mean if you didn't glory in it. Then it's simply your self-will and your pride. Self-will has been your besetting sin ever since you were a little baby crying for something you couldn't have. You kicked before you could talk. "Goodness knows I've done everything I could to break you of it." "Yes, Mamma darling." She remembered. The faded green and grey curtains and the yellow birchwood furniture remembered. Mamma sat on the little chair at the foot of the big yellow bed. You knelt in her lap and played with the gold tassel while Mamma asked you to give up your will. "I brought you up to care for God and for the truth." "You did. And I care so awfully for both of them that I won't believe things about God that aren't true." "And how do you know what's true and what isn't? You set up your little judgment against all the wise and learned people who believe as you were taught to believe. I wonder how you dare." "It's the risk we're all taking. We may every single one of us be wrong. Still, if some things are true other things can't be. Don't look so unhappy, Mamma." "How can I be anything else? When I think of you living without God in the world, and of what will happen to you when you die." "It's your belief that makes you unhappy, not me." "That's the cruellest thing you've said yet." "You know I'd rather die than hurt you." "Die, indeed! When you hurt me every minute of the day. If it had been anything but unbelief. If I even saw you humble and sorry about it. But you seem to be positively enjoying yourself."