... Indeed, if one comes to think of it, one’s shoes are rather like the sturdy little boys among one’s clothes. One’s slippers are more like little girls, all straps and bows and tiptoes. Then one’s aprons must be the babies, long and white and dainty. And one’s frocks and suits--that is to say, one’s _new_ frocks and suits--are the ladies and gentlemen, important and elegant; and one’s everyday things are the men and women, neither important nor elegant, but best of all; and one’s oldest garments are the witches, shapeless and sad and haunted. This leaves ribbons and sashes and beads to be fairies--both good and bad. The silence of the Nameless tree was to lift a little that very day. When Mother had gone in the house,--something seemed always to be pulling at Mother to be back in the house as, in the house, something always pulled at me to be back out-of-doors,--I remember that I was twisting the rope and then lying back over the board, head down, for the untwisting. And while my head was whirling and my feet were guiding, I looked up at the tree and saw it as I had never seen it before: soft falling skirts of white with lacy edges and flowery patterns, drooping and billowing all about a pedestal, which was the tree trunk, and up-tapering at the top like a waist--why, the tree was a lady! Leaning in the air there above the branches, surely I could see her beautiful shoulders and her white arms, her calm face and her bright hair against the blue. She had risen out of the trunk at the tree’s blossoming and was waiting for someone to greet her. I struggled out of the swing and scrambled, breathless, back from the tree and looked where she should be. Already I knew her. Nearly, I knew the things that she would say to me--sometimes now I know the things that she would have said if we had not been interrupted. The interruption came from four girls who lived, as I thought, outside my world,--for those were the little days when I did not yet know that this cannot be. They were the Eversley sisters, in full-skirted, figured calico, and they all had large, chapped hands and wide teeth and stout shoes. For a year they had been wont to pass our house on the way to the public school, but they had spoken to me no more than if I had been invisible--until the day when I had first entered school. After that, it was as if I had been born into their air, or thrown in the same cage, or had somehow become one of them. And I was in terror of them. “Come ’ere once!” they commanded, their voices falling like sharp pebbles about the Apple-blossom lady and me.