This Proud Heart by Pearl S. Buck Read Free Book Online Page A

felt a little angry with him.
    “Nothing, except that sometimes the way you do things—the way you go ahead—sort of—people don’t always understand.”
    She went on slicing the orange. He had hurt her, but she would not tell him.
    “Oh, everybody knows me in this little town,” she said quietly. “They’ve always known me—Lucile and the girls and all the boys.” She felt suddenly far away from Mark. Once when she was quite small, she had heard a teacher say to another, “Sue is a strange child, isn’t she? She’s not like the other children.”
    She snapped on the light and he saw her face.
    “I guess I don’t know what I am talking about,” he said slowly. “You—I want you to be yourself.”
    “I can’t be anything else,” she said. “Come, Mark—sit down.”
    And when they sat down, he said, “This is the best fruit salad I’ve ever tasted, Sue—you’re a wonder of a cook.”
    A handful of words flew out of her brain and hung on the end of her tongue. She almost let them flick out at him like the barbed end of a serpent’s tongue. “There’s a bitter orange in it, Mark—take care!”
    If she spoke them, he would look at her innocent and surprised. She withheld them. She was too easily hurt. She had learned long ago to withhold the flick of her words when she was hurt. She learned, when she was quite a child, that she could make her mother look afraid when she spoke out what flashed from her brain. The first time she had seen the fear in her mother’s eyes she went away into her room and cried. “I must never—never—never—make anyone afraid of me because I am hurt,” she told herself passionately, and remembered it forever.
    “Have another helping, then, my darling,” she said to Mark and filled the plate he held out to her.
    But they went no more into the wood. Mark did not want to go and she would not go without him. But suddenly, for no reason, she remembered something. Upstairs in the attic was the unfinished head. Though she went to the attic sometimes to clean and dust, she did nothing else there. Now, because Mark had hurt her, she went upstairs the next day and she stood, looking thoughtfully about the empty room. But she did nothing to furnish it. She still did not even lift the cloth from the unfinished head.
    “You have everything a woman could want,” her mother said one day, looking around the living room. “A good husband and a nice home in the best neighborhood in town.”
    “Yes, I have everything,” she said, smiling.
    “Mark’s so steady,” her mother went on. She had refused to take off her hat. “I’ve got to get right back,” she always said. She might sit an hour or two, but if she had her hat on she felt she was going at any moment. “The work’s piled up waiting.”
    “I’ll come back with you,” said Susan. “I’m all finished.”
    “Oh no,” her mother said quickly. “You have your own house now. I wouldn’t want Mark to think I couldn’t manage—”
    “I’m just coming home to see you,” she said, laughing. “Besides, I have everything in our house just about finished—all except the attic, and I don’t know yet what I want to do to that.”
    “It looks lovely,” her mother said wistfully, looking around on the shining order. “You keep it wonderfully—you always had a knack.”
    “It keeps itself,” said Susan, “it’s the easiest house in the world. It lives along with us. Things just run back into their places—like this!”
    She waved her hands and lifted her eyebrows. But her mother did not smile.
    “It’s all right now,” she said with meaning. “Later, you’ll find you have to have help. Well, I must go.”
    “I’ll get my hat,” said Susan.
    “It’s a real sweet house,” her mother said, pausing on the new sidewalk to look back. “The only thing is, I shouldn’t care, for myself, to live on the edge of those black woods.”
    “I like them, somehow,” Susan answered, “though Mark feels as you