# Growing Up (Vorse)/Chapter 27

THOUGH Sara hadn't yet arrived at having disconcerting grown-up moments, she was as hard to understand as Robert and there were often times when it was as impossible to catch her thoughts as it would be to capture erratic butterflies. They would flutter around Alice, but always just out of reach. What Sara meant by the things she was saying would remain interesting but tantalizingly obscure. That Robert had always been an articulate child made it all the harder to understand Sara. Jamie at three was more comprehensible. Jamie's communications were mostly in the imperative. "Give me!" "Let go!" alternated with a fair amount of regularity with "I want," and also with softer demands such as, "Kiss Jamie."
But in Sara's life realities were not. Things she wanted to be so, were. Time had no existence, and all unpleasant commands, and unpalatable ideas were hastily shoved away in a mental glory-hole whose door opened inward easily, but had to be pulled outward by force. Those fatal words: "Don't you remember what Mother said?" would fire no answering spark in Sara's mind. What "Mother had said" had gone to the glory-hole and there, for all Sara cared, it could stay. But of course if Alice wanted to resurrect her own prying and unpleasant words, why, let her; she could do it without Sara's help.
If you wanted to find out why Sara wanted to do certain things or why she had done them, then, indeed, you had a chase before you, and just as you thought you had ​pinned her down and at last had the thought which had actuated her conduct living in your hand, whish! it had gone away, and you had no clue!
As Alice was an unusually reasonable mother she always tried to catch Sara's thoughts, believing as she did that they had some relation to Sara's acts.
"If you could only find out what Sara was thinking about, you could find out why she acted as she did," was the way Alice reasoned.
There were so many things that Sara did that were impenetrable, to the adult mind. Take the bedtime things, for instance, Sara always had made a fuss about bedtime things. She had always insisted upon putting her dolls to bed. When there were only three or four dolls this was all very well, but Sara had begun putting Teddy Bears to bed also.
So far, so good. Then came the day of Kewpies. Everybody who came to see Sara brought her a Kewpie. They brought rubber ones, they brought little ones, they brought large, expensive ones, and all these Sara immediately dressed by cutting a hole in any piece of cloth she could find for the head to poke through, and sewing up the two sides.
When her mother pointed out they were meant to be without clothes, Sara's attitude toward Alice was that of an Anglo-Saxon woman toward a South Italian. It was all very well for an ignorant, South Italian child to go around with one short and inadequate shirt over its little stomach, but as for her children——
Clothes for Kewpies were bad enough, but when it came to providing them all with bed and bedding, Alice felt it was too much. Again, however, Sara proved too much for her mother. Her disapproving attitude seemed to say, "Do you think that Kewpies, because they have wings, roost upon trees?"
​In fact Sara's attitude toward them was that of a missionary having rescued them from a savage life. One gathered that she highly disapproved of all their doings when out of captivity. No scuffling around naked for Sara's Kewpies—no roosting on trees! No living in nests any more! No high-minded missionary ever descended upon an innocent South Sea tribe and put them all into shirts and trousers with greater gusto than did Sara.
She would despoil her own dolls, those with cotton or kid bodies, for the sake of making clothes for her Kewpies. Her dolls would sprawl round indecorously—nakedness as such was not repellent to Sara's moral sense. When her mother tried to find out why Kewpies needed clothes—"They'll catch cold," said Sara, indicating Kewpies, "these won't."
"But why?" asked Alice. "Why will they catch cold?"
"Because," was Sara's reply, and the intonation in which she answered made her mother feel a fool for having asked her the question.
"They don't catch cold," Alice pursued.
"They do," said Sara, "they do!" Temper shone dangerously near. Alice saw that it was the part of a wise parent to drop the subject; but that night the nursery resembled a hospital ward in an Arctic clime. It was not with ordinary maternal feeling that Sara put her Kewpies to bed. She performed this service with an impatient intensity, glowering over her shoulder and casting suspicious glances upon her mother and nurse as one who would say, "Touch one of these blankets if you dare!" There was that about her that suggested she would suffer martyrdom and was even ready to brave the terrors of a spanking should any one ​interfere with her impassioned putting-to-bed of her Kewpies.
She was dressed in a woolly bath robe, her hair braided in two stiff little braids that stack out aggressively at an angle. She covered and tucked up her dolls with still intensity, making sure they were tucked in head and foot, and that no amount of kicking on their part would disturb their well-adjusted bedclothes. Now and then she looked over her shoulder at her mother with the air of a dog with a bone.
There is nothing more concentrated, nothing more potentially fierce which occurs before our eyes than the common spectacle of a dog with a bone. Only that we are used to it, and because dogs are smaller than we, do our hearts fail to shake before the spectacle of the tearing and rending, the wild and defiant glances, with savagery only two steps off and the jungle just around the corner.