She left it unfinished at a point which gave no doubt as to whose cookies they might have been had I not been offensively about. But the cookies were fresh, and I felt no false delicacy. However, after deliberation, I ate my own, one at a time, rejecting the sandwich method. “It lasts them longest,” I explained. “The other way they bite thicker,” Delia contended. “Your teeth don’t taste,” I objected scientifically. Delia opened her eyes. “Why, they do too!” she cried. I considered. I had always had great respect for the strange chorus of my teeth, and I was perfectly ready to regard them as having independent powers. “Oh, not when you eat tipsy-toes like that,” said Delia, scornfully. “Lemme show you....” She leaned for my cooky, her own being gone. I ran shamelessly down the path toward the swing, and by the time the swing was reached I had frankly abandoned serial bites. I sat on the grass, giving Delia the swing as a peace-offering. She took it, as a matter of course, and did not scruple to press her advantage. “Don’t you want to swing me?” she said. I particularly disliked being asked in that way to do things. Grown-ups were always doing it, and what could be more absurd: “Don’t you want to pick up your things now?” “Don’t you want to let auntie have that chair?” “Don’t you want to take this over to Mrs. Rodman?” The form of the query always struck me as quite shameless. I truthfully shook my head. “I’m company,” Delia intimated. “When you’re over to my house, I have to let you swing because you’re company,” I said speculatively, “and when I’m over to your house, I have to let you swing because it’s your swing.” “I don’t care about being company,” said Delia, loftily, and started home. “I’ll swing you. I was only fooling!” I said, scrambling up. It worked--as Delia knew it would and always did work. All the same, as I pushed Delia, with my eyes on the blue-check gingham strap buttoned across the back of her apron, I reflected on the truth and its parallels: How, when Delia came to see me, I had to “pick up” the playthings and set in order store or ship or den or cave or county fair or whatnot because Delia had to go home early; and when I was over to Delia’s, I had to help put things away because they were hers and she had got them out. Low-swing, high-swing, now-I’m-going-to-run-under-swing--I gave them all to Delia and sank on the grass to watch the old cat die. As it died, Delia suddenly twisted the rope and then dropped back and lay across the board and loosed her hands. I never dared “let go,” as we said, but Delia did and lay whirling, her hair falling out like a sun’s rays, and her eyes shut. I watched her, fascinated. If she opened her eyes, I knew how the picket fence would swim for her, no longer a line but a circle. Then I remembered what I had seen in the tree when I was twisting, and I looked back....