Eves Diary | Page 6

put it down
again. Then he went away. NOTHING interests him.
But I was interested. There were ashes, gray and soft and delicate and
pretty--I knew what they were at once. And the embers; I knew the
embers, too. I found my apples, and raked them out, and was glad; for I
am very young and my appetite is active. But I was disappointed; they
were all burst open and spoiled. Spoiled apparently; but it was not so;
they were better than raw ones. Fire is beautiful; some day it will be
useful, I think.

FRIDAY.--I saw him again, for a moment, last Monday at nightfall, but
only for a moment. I was hoping he would praise me for trying to
improve the estate, for I had meant well and had worked hard. But he
was not pleased, and turned away and left me. He was also displeased
on another account: I tried once more to persuade him to stop going

over the Falls. That was because the fire had revealed to me a new
passion --quite new, and distinctly different from love, grief, and those
others which I had already discovered--FEAR. And it is horrible!--I
wish I had never discovered it; it gives me dark moments, it spoils my
happiness, it makes me shiver and tremble and shudder. But I could not
persuade him, for he has not discovered fear yet, and so he could not
understand me.

EXTRACT FROM ADAM'S DIARY
Perhaps I ought to remember that she is very young, a mere girl and
make allowances. She is all interest, eagerness, vivacity, the world is to
her a charm, a wonder, a mystery, a joy; she can't speak for delight
when she finds a new flower, she must pet it and caress it and smell it
and talk to it, and pour out endearing names upon it. And she is
color-mad: brown rocks, yellow sand, gray moss, green foliage, blue
sky; the pearl of the dawn, the purple shadows on the mountains, the
golden islands floating in crimson seas at sunset, the pallid moon
sailing through the shredded cloud-rack, the star-jewels glittering in the
wastes of space--none of them is of any practical value, so far as I can
see, but because they have color and majesty, that is enough for her,
and she loses her mind over them. If she could quiet down and keep
still a couple minutes at a time, it would be a reposeful spectacle. In
that case I think I could enjoy looking at her; indeed I am sure I could,
for I am coming to realize that she is a quite remarkably comely
creature --lithe, slender, trim, rounded, shapely, nimble, graceful; and
once when she was standing marble-white and sun-drenched on a
boulder, with her young head tilted back and her hand shading her eyes,
watching the flight of a bird in the sky, I recognized that she was
beautiful.

MONDAY NOON.--If there is anything on the planet that she is not
interested in it is not in my list. There are animals that I am indifferent
to, but it is not so with her. She has no discrimination, she takes to all
of them, she thinks they are all treasures, every new one is welcome.

When the mighty brontosaurus came striding into camp, she regarded it
as an acquisition, I considered it a calamity; that is a good sample of
the lack of harmony that prevails in our views of things. She wanted to
domesticate it, I wanted to make it a present of the homestead and
move out. She believed it could be tamed by kind treatment and would
be a good pet; I said a pet twenty-one feet high and eighty-four feet
long would be no proper thing to have about the place, because, even
with the best intentions and without meaning any harm, it could sit
down on the house and mash it, for any one could see by the look of its
eye that it was absent-minded.
Still, her heart was set upon having that monster, and she couldn't give
it up. She thought we could start a dairy with it, and wanted me to help
milk it; but I wouldn't; it was too risky. The sex wasn't right, and we
hadn't any ladder anyway. Then she wanted to ride it, and look at the
scenery. Thirty or forty feet of its tail was lying on the ground, like a
fallen tree, and she thought she could climb it, but she was mistaken;
when she got to the steep place it was too slick and down she came, and
would have hurt herself but for me.
Was she satisfied now? No. Nothing ever satisfies her but
demonstration; untested theories are not in her line, and