entering second childhood. You'll be old some day, you know.' And he
said this with such a twisted sort of smile that I felt awfully
sorry for him, and he saw it and opened out and told me how
appalling it was to become feeble when the heart is as young as
ever. I had no idea he felt like that."

"When I left him I tried hard to be as patient as he asked me to be
and wait till Mother comes back and make the allowances he spoke
about and give up seeing you and all that. But when I got up to my
room with the echo of Grandmother's rasping voice in my ears, the
thought of being shut up in the house for a week and treated like a
lunatic was too much for me. What had I done that every other
healthy girl doesn't do every day without a question? How COULD I go
on living there, watched and suspected? How could I put up any
longer with the tyranny of an old lady who made me feel artificial
and foolish and humiliated--a kind of doll stuffed with saw dust?

"Marty, I couldn't do it. I simply couldn't. Something went snap,
and I just flung a few things into a suit-case, dropped it out the
window, climbed down the creeper and made a dash for freedom.
Nothing on earth will ever take me back to that house again,
nothing, nothing!"

All this had been said with a mixture of humor and emotion that
carried the boy before it. He saw and heard everything as she
described it. His own relations with his father, which had been so
free and friendly, made Joan's with those two old people seem
fantastic and impossible. All his sympathy went out to her. To help
her to get away appealed to him as being as humane as releasing a
squirrel from a trap. No thought of the fact that she was a girl who