Page:Confessions of a wife (IA confessionsofwif00adamiala).pdf/59

 anything that might be mentioned, except that one dreadful thing. I am afraid I did say "wife." No; now I think of it, it was he who said that. All I said was "Yes," and, on the whole, sometime, perhaps, I would; and all I did was not to turn him out of the room after I had said it. That is n't strictly true, either. It was n't quite all I did. As for him, he did so many things that I don't dare to think of them, because, if I do, the Wilderness Girl in me comes up, and I feel as if I could call out my whole tribe and have them kill him on the spot—I do indeed.

But the perfectly ridiculous thing about that is that if I saw so much as a woodpecker nipping at him, I should kill the woodpecker! And if I saw anybody really trying to do him any harm, all the tomahawks of colonial history would have to hit me first. I think I should feel a positive ecstasy in a tomahawk that was meant for him.

This seems to me a pitiable state of mind for a girl to be in. I don't respect it; really, I don't. There 's a part of me that stands off and looks on at myself, and keeps quite collected and sane, and says, "What a lunatic that girl is!" But the Wilderness Girl does n't mind the other girl a bit, and this is what mortifies me so.