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We greeted them by their full names. We asked them friendly questions which indicated that we had a detailed understanding of their lives. We apologized for having perhaps shocked some of them for changing so quickly.

“We simply did not realize,” Eliza said, “that anybody wanted us to be intelligent.”

We were by then so in charge of things that I, too, dared to speak of important matters. My high voice wouldn’t be silly any more.

“With your cooperation,” I said, “we will make this mansion famous for intelligence as it has been infamous for idiocy in days gone by. Let the fences come down.”

“Are there any questions?” said Eliza.

There were none.

• • •

Somebody called Dr. Mott.

• • •

Our mother did not come down to breakfast. She remained in bed—petrified.

Father came down alone. He was wearing his nightclothes. He had not shaved. Young as he was, he was palsied and drawn.

Eliza and I were puzzled that he did not look happier. We hailed him not only in English, but in several other languages we knew.

It was to one of these foreign salutations that he responded at last. “Bon jour,” he said.

“Sit thee doon! Sit thee doon!” said Eliza merrily.

The poor man sat.

• • •

He was sick with guilt, of course, over having allowed intelligent human beings, his own flesh and blood, to be treated like idiots for so long.

Worse: His conscience and his advisors had told him before that it was all right if he could not love us, since we were incapable of deep feelings, and since there was nothing about us, objectively, that anyone in his right mind could love. But now it was his duty to love us, and he did not think he could do it.

He was horrified to discover what our mother knew she would discover, if she came downstairs: That intelligence and sensitivity in monstrous bodies like Eliza’s and mine merely made us more repulsive.

This was not Father’s fault or Mother’s fault. It was not anybody’s fault. It was as natural as breathing to all human beings, and to all warm-blooded creatures, for that matter, to wish quick deaths for monsters. This was an instinct.

And now Eliza and I had raised that instinct to intolerable tragedy.

Without knowing what we were doing, Eliza and I were putting the traditional curse of monsters on normal creatures. We were asking for respect.

12

IN THE MIDST of all the excitement, Eliza and I allowed our heads to be separated by several feet—so we were not thinking brilliantly any more.

We became dumb enough to think that Father was merely sleepy. So we made him drink coffee, and we tried to wake him up with some songs and riddles we knew.

I remember I asked him if he knew why cream was so much more expensive than milk.

He mumbled that he didn’t know the answer.

So Eliza told him, “It’s because the cows hate to squat on the little bottles.”

We laughed about that. We rolled on the floor. And then Eliza got up and stood over him, with her hands on her hips, and scolded him affectionately, as though he were a little boy. “Oh, what a sleepy-head!” she said. “Oh, what a sleepy-head!”

At that moment, Dr. Stewart Rawlings Mott arrived.

• • •

Although Dr. Mott had been told on the telephone about Eliza’s and my sudden metamorphosis, the day was like any other day to him, seemingly. He said what he always said when he arrived at the mansion: “And how is everybody today?”

I now spoke the first intelligent sentence Dr. Mott had ever heard from me. “Father won’t wake up,” I said.

“Won’t he, now?” he replied. He rewarded the completeness of my sentence with the faintest of smiles.

Dr. Mott was so unbelievably bland, in fact, that he turned away from us to chat with Oveta Cooper, the practical nurse. Her mother had apparently been sick down in the hamlet. “Oveta—” he said, “you’ll be pleased to know that your mother’s temperature is almost normal.”

Father was angered by this casualness, and no doubt glad to find someone with whom he could be openly angry.

“How long has this been going on, Doctor?