Page 174 (1/2)

When she crawled out, after an hour or so, she went rather

stiffly to play She willed to forget She cut off her childish

soul from memory, so that the pain, and the insult should not be

real She asserted herself only There was not nothing in the

world but her own self So very soon, she caainst her And very early, she

learned that even her adored father was part of this

malevolence And very early she learned to harden her soul in

resistance and denial of all that was outside her, harden

herself upon her own being

She never felt sorry for what she had done, she never forgave

those who had uilty If he had said to her, "Why,

Ursula, did you trample my carefully-made bed?" that would have

hurt her to the quick, and she would have done anything for him

But she was always tors

The earth was to walk on Why must she avoid a certain patch,

just because it was called a seed-bed? It was the earth to walk

on This was her instinctive assumption And when he bullied

her, she became hard, cut herself off from all connection, lived

in the little separate world of her own violent will

As she grew older, five, six, seven, the connection between

her and her father was even stronger Yet it was always