# Growing Up (Vorse)/Chapter 15

SARA haunted this forbidden paradise with impassioned pertinacity. It seemed to Alice that she never looked out of the window without seeing Sara wistfully hanging over the fence or sitting forlorn on the Williams's steps. Always she was peeping in through the front door to get a glimpse of the land beyond, of the forbidden country.
Alice was standing by the window one day. She saw the Williams children disappear in their house. She saw Tillie stand in the doorway, beckoning to Sara. Sara glanced furtively over her shoulder toward home and vanished inside the door.
As Alice walked toward her neighbors her step and bearing would have told any child with sense that here was an outraged parent. Even worse things awaited her. As Alice was passing some shrubbery Sara whisked out of the house again, looked toward home with that furtive look shocking to behold on so young a countenance, and by the time Alice arrived she was sitting in her accustomed pose, a picture of patient if mournful resignation. No one could have told she had moved. The only incriminating evidence was a lump in her cheek and crumbs on her lips.
"What have you got in your mouth, dear?" asked Alice with treacherous sweetness.
"A piece of cookie," answered Sara. She didn't take her head from her hands. She stared ahead of her stolidly.
"Where did you get it?"
​"Tillie gave it to me."
"You know you oughtn't to eat between meals." A nod. "Did you go in the house?"
A shake of the head.
"Not once? Speak out loud, Sara dear, and tell the truth."
At this with deep conviction Sara said:
"Not once in the house."
Sara had committed all the crimes of childhood at once in a broad reckless fashion. She had lied, she had disobeyed, she had eaten between meals. But she had sinned in a mean, sly spirit. When confronted with the truth she said Tillie had made her come in.
It was this that disgusted her parents.
Robert would have out with it like a man, whatever it was, they agreed.
Of course she had to be punished.
The next time she was allowed to go to the house next door she vanished again. When Alice went for her she ran toward her, saying blithely,
"I was in the house, Mother."
Alice didn't know what to do. Sara had disobeyed, but told the truth about it. Alice did not wish to nip the frail blossom of truth in the bud. Next day Sara vanished again.
"Oh, will she never learn!" cried her anguished mother.
Again by the time Alice got there, Sara was in the front yard.
"Were you in the house again?" cried Alice.
"Yes," replied Sara raising fearless eyes to her mother.
"What makes you say that, Sara," said Mrs. Williams from the window. "You weren't in the house. You haven't been in the house since your mother punished ​you. She was playing behind the smoke tree with the other children, Mrs. Marcey."
Sara whose heart was at ease, ran to her mother, clasp ing her about the knee, with her little cry of:
"Mother, I love you." And at this moment the idea concerning Sara which had long been at the back of Alice's mind came out definitely into the sunlight. So much in the sunlight that it communicated itself to Tom, when Rob explained with scorn:
"Sara don't know anything! She asked me, 'Which way now ought I to say the truth—I was in the house, or I wasn't—I forget.'"
She, poor dear, was ready to say either. For a second Sara's father and mother had a glimpse into Sara's mind, and there is nothing harder to see into than the mind of a little girl just five years old. Some of the things they saw were:
"When my father and my mother laugh at me I have been good. When they frown at me I have been bad.
"The truth is saying, 'I have been in the house.' They are so glad you do it."
There were other sound pieces of logic like this, but both Alice and Tom Marcey now knew that the truth, for Sara was "Mother, I love you."
Facts had not begun to exist for her. Tom and Alice would have to wait a while until they did. In the meantime Sara was a slave. She was a slave to her flooding affections. The only thing of importance was to avoid giving her dear mother and father pain—and herself the pain of their displeasure. If she forgot and did things she had been told not to do of course she lied. For slaves always lie. It is only free men like Robert the Fearless who tell the disagreeable truth.