Runaway

She wasn’t exactly like everybody else. But who is? I mean, I never thought I was.

Or did she go out and sit on the swing, and creak back and forth, with no company but the rising moon?

She was a girl who would drink untreated water from any old tin mug hanging over a well.

But the difference was that he would go on, he would not settle for less. As she would have to do—as she had already done—being a girl.

I used to have a feeling something really unusual would occur in my life, and it would be important to have recorded everything. Was that just a feeling?

The trouble is none of it stuck in my head, because all the time I was reading I was also thinking

If ever I am seriously ill I hope I am able to destroy this diary or go through and stroke out any mean things in it, in case I die.

This is ridiculous. This I do not accept.

Yet those few hours filled her with an assurance that the life she was going back to, which seemed so makeshift and unsatisfactory, was only temporary and could easily be put up with. And there was a radiance behind it, behind that life, behind everything, expressed by the sunlight seen through the train windows.

She never tried to pretend she was anything but an unlucky person, stunted halfway between childhood and female maturity.