And it was just at this hour of social reëstablishment that my birthday swung round again, for the thirty-third time, and brought with it a change in my outer life which was to lead on to even greater changes in all my modes of thinking and feeling. Odd, that a drunken quarrel in a four-room house toward the wrong end of Birch Street could so affect the destiny of a luxurious _dilettante_, living at the very center of bonded respectability, in a mansion of sad-colored stone, on a short broad avenue which is right at both ends! V "Never in this (obviously outcast) world!" grumbled Bob Blake, bringing his malletlike fist down on the marble top of the parlor table. The blow made his half-filled glass jump and clinkle; so he emptied it slowly, then poured in four fingers more, forgetting to add water this time, and sullenly pushed the bottle across to Pearl. But Pearl was fretful. Her watery blue eyes were fixed upon the drumhead of the banjo, where it hung suspended above the melodeon. "I did so paint them flowers. And well you know it. What's the good of bein' so mean? If you wasn't heeled you'd let me have it my way. Didn't I bring that banjo with me?" "Hungh! Say you did. What does that prove?" "I guess it proves somethin', all right." "Proves you swiped it, likely." "Me! I ain't that kind, thanks." "The hell you ain't." "If you're tryin' to get gay, cut it out!" "Not me." "Well, then--quit!" This was shortly after supper. It was an unusually hot, humid evening; doors and windows stood open to no purpose; and Susan was sitting out on the monolithic door slab, fighting off mosquitoes. She found that this defensive warfare partly distracted her from the witless, interminable bickering within. Moreover, the striated effluvia of whisky, talcum powder, and perspiration had made her head feel a little queer. By comparison, the fetid breath from the exposed mud banks of the salt marsh was almost refreshing. Possibly it was because her head did feel a little queer that Susan began presently to wonder about things. Between her days at the neighboring public school and her voluntary rounds of housework, Susan had not of late years had much waking time to herself. In younger and less crowded hours, before her father had been informed by the authorities that he must either send his child to school or take the consequences, Susan had put in all her spare moments at wondering. She would see a toad in the back yard, for example, under a plantain leaf, and she would begin to wonder. She would wonder what it felt like to be a toad. And before very long something would happen to her, inside, and she would _be_ a toad. She would have toad thoughts and toad feelings.... There would stretch above her a dim, green, balancing canopy--the plantain leaf. All about her were soaring, translucent fronds--the grass. It was cool there under the plantain leaf; but she was enormously fat and ugly, her brain felt like sooty cobwebs, and nobody loved her.