Still, she didn't care much. She could feel her soft gray throat, like a blown-into glove finger, pulsing slowly--which was almost as soothing a sensation as letting the swing die down. It made her feel as if Someone--some great unhappy cloudlike Being--were making up a song, a song about most everything; chanting it sleepily to himself--or was it _herself_?--somewhere; and as if she were part of this beautiful, unhappy song. But all the time she knew that if that white fluffy restlessness--that moth miller--fluttered only a little nearer among those golden-green fronds, she knew if it reached the cool rim of her plantain shade, she knew, then, that something terrible would happen to her--knew that something swift and blind, that she couldn't help, would coil deep within her like a spring and so launch her forward, open-jawed. It was awful--awful for the moth miller--but she couldn't _not_ do it. She was a toad.... And it was the same with her father. There were things he couldn't not do. She could be--sitting very still in a corner--_be_ her father, when he was angry; and she knew he couldn't help it. It was just a dark slow whirling inside, with red sparks flying swiftly out from it. And it hurt while it lasted. Being her father like that always made her sorry for him. But she wished, and she felt he must often wish, that he couldn't be at all. There were lots of live things that would be happier if they weren't live things; and _if_ they weren't, Susan felt, the great cloudlike Being would be less unhappy too. Naturally, I am giving you Susan's later interpretations of her pre-schoolday wonderings; and a number of you would gasp a little, knowing what firm, delicate imaginings all Susan Blake's later interpretations were, if I should give you her pen name as well--which I have promised myself not to do. This is not an official study of a young writer of peculiar distinction; it is merely an unpretending book about a little girl I knew and a young married woman I still know--one and the same person. It is what I have named it--that only: _The Book of Susan_. Meanwhile, this humid June night--to the sordid accompaniment of Bob and Pearl snarling at each other half-drunkenly within--Susan waits for us on the monolithic door slab; and there is a new wonder in her dizzy little head. I can't do better than let her tell you in her own words what this new wonder was like.