Children -- Fiction; Fairy tales; Girls -- Fiction; Play -- Fiction
Next morning, “Now it’s to-morrow!” we would joyfully announce, only
to be informed that it was, on the contrary, to-day. But there was no
cause for alarm, for now the party, it seemed, had changed too, and
that would be to-day. It was frightfully confusing.
“_When_ is to-morrow?” we demanded.
“When to-day stops being,” they said.
But never, never once did to-day stop that much. Gradually we
understood and humoured the pathetic delusion of the Grown-ups: _To-day
lasted always and yet the poor things kept right on forever waiting for
to-morrow._
As for me, I had been born without the time sense. If I was told that
we would go to drive in ten minutes, I always assumed that I could
finish dressing my doll, tidy my play-house, put her in it with all
her family disposed about her down to the penny black-rubber baby
dressed in yarn, wash my face and hands, smooth my hair (including
the protests that these were superfluous), make sure that the kitten
was shut in the woodshed ... long before most of which the family
was following me, haling me away, chiding me for keeping older folk
waiting, and the ten minutes were gone far by. Who would have thought
it? Ten minutes seem so much.
And if I went somewhere with permission to stay an hour! Then the
hour stretched invitingly before me, a vista lined with crowding
possibilities.
“How long can you stay?” we always promptly asked our guests, for there
was a feeling that the quality of the game to be entered on depended
on the time at our disposal. But when they asked me, it never was
conceivable that anything so real as a game should be dependent on
anything so hazy as time.
“Oh, a whole hour!” I would say royally. “Let’s play City.”
With this attitude Delia Dart, who lived across the street, had no
patience. Delia was definite. Her evenly braided hair, her square
finger tips, her blunt questions, her sense of what was due to
Delia--all these were definite.
“City!” she would burst out. “You can’t play City unless you’ve got all
afternoon.”
And Margaret Amelia and Betty Rodman, who were pretty definite too,
would back Delia up; but since they usually had permission to stay all
afternoon, they would acquiesce when I urged: “Oh, well, let’s start
in anyhow.” Then about the time the outside wall had been laid up in
the sand-pile and we had selected our building sites, the town clock
would strike my hour, which would be brought home to me only by Delia
saying:--
“Don’t you go. Will she care if you’re late?”
On such occasions we never used the substantive, but merely “she.”
It is worth being a child to have a sense of values so simple and
unassailable as that.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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