"
"Ye're too young tae understand yet," began Wullie.
"I'm not. I'm not too young to understand that I won't be weak--tied
down. The doctor said women were all weaker than men, and I thought
perhaps most women might be. But not me. And then--Wullie, I want to be
like a lion or a tiger, and kill things that get in the way, and--oh,
I'll hate being a human being with a body that gets in the way."
"My poor old carcass has always been in the way," said Wullie wistfully,
and she ran out of the hut, unable to bear the pity of that, right up on
Ben Grief. But before she reached the top she had to take off the tight
bandages, for she found she could scarcely breathe, much less climb in
them, and her shoes and stockings she hid under a bush until she came
back, for they crippled her feet.
For three days she did not bathe and undressed in the dark every night.
But after that the water called her insistently, and she went back to
it, swimming in a deliberately unconscious way, as though she had
promised someone she would not notice herself any more.
But insensibly her dreams changed; instead of being a Deliverer now she
dreamed, in spite of herself, of a Deliverer with whom she could go hand
in hand; as the mild May days drew along to a hot June the dreams varied
strangely. Up on Ben Grief all alone in the wind, hungry and blown about
she would see herself preaching in the wilderness, eating locusts and
wild honey, clad in the roughest sheep-skins.
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