ELLEN TERHUNE
513
the squirrels. "Do you think they like to do that?" I asked. "I don't
know," the girl seriously answered. "They don't have to go in there, you
know. But I suppose it must he rather discouraging for them when they
stop and the wheel begins to carry them back. It always makes them start
working again even when they must be tired. They're afraid of going
backwards, I guess. Yes: I don't think that can be at all pleasant." She
gave her bang a twitch. "Some people are sorry they were horn, hut
everybody has a right to their lives, don't you think they have? People
just have to go ahead and live."
I thought I caught an echo here of old plays by Bernard Shaw or
other writings of the live·your·own·life era, which she had got hold of and
which had made an impression on her. But it reminded me also of Ellen
and her talk about her mother and father. The girl, of course, was right:
you did have to go ahead and live. I felt a little disgusted by Ellen's
attempt to undo her own past by having Sigismund's studio removed.
After all, he had studied and composed there in the most creditable phase
of his career. They had worked together, been something together, even
though they had later pulled apart. And now she had struck it out as if
it had never been.
As we were watching, the squirrel in the cage stopped running against
its treadmill. But it did not behave as the girl had described: it allowed
itself to be carried around tail·first for several revolutions, then darted
out of the wheel and began rushing up and down and from one corner
of the cage to the other, as if it were trying to find a breach.
"Do you like them in cages like that," I asked as we were walking
away, "or running around wild?" "When they're wild," she readily
replied, "they aren't really any more free than they are when they're kept
in
cages, if you take the different conditions into account. They can only
live in certain places where they can get certain kinds of things to eat,
and in the cage they don't have to worry about food because we give them
lots of nuts and things-and they're safer than they are outside, because
they're protected from the red squirrels. The red squirrels bite the gray
squirrels and try to drive them out." She was a formidable little pedant–
perhaps a little prig. She could never have been much with other children.
It was appalling to think of the figure she would cut among boys and
girls of her own age in that outlandish dress and black stockings and
with those metal hands on her teeth. I felt, in fact, a certain nervous self·
consciousness involved with her precocious complacency.
"I shouldn't mind living in a cage," she went on, "if I was sure I'd
get out someday. I
am
in a sort of cage out here." These shifts of hers
disconcerted me, and I didn't know how to reply. "Young people often
feel they're caged," I said in a tone of lightness and kindness hut with a
feeling that I was being sententious. "But, as you say, they find the way
out." "Grandfather doesn't want me to go away to school, because he
says that he
an~
the governess can teach me a great deal better, and when
I went to school in New York last winter it did make it rather embarrassing
