"What's wrong with your nice velveteen jacket?"
She slid off the window-seat and went down-stairs. Val had her full share of the young heart's passionate instinct to keep its aching to itself. She had no idea that her grandmother had seen her standing outside the parlor door when Ethan was there alone, hesitating, trying to go in, trying to go away, and in the end succeeding only under strong inward compulsion in compassing the latter. It was well she never dreamed how much the old eyes saw. She was sure that the world she was dwelling in was a place no mortal foot had ever trod before. The girl felt herself a solitary way-breaker through a virgin forest; if she should tell the thousandth part of the magic and the mystery of this new world of her discovery, no mortal would believe such travellers' tales.
She listened fascinated the night Ethan said, in answer to his uncle's platitude about "the common experience":
"There's no such thing! Experience is no more reduplicated than faces are."
"Of course, I don't mean down to the smallest detail," John Gano had explained.
"Oh, as to that, we have birth and death in common, if that's all."
"There's a wonderful family likeness in the other facts of life," his uncle persisted.
"Yes," said Mrs. Gano; "it is when we are young that we think there could never have been anything to match our experience."
"Then do you think now that your life has been a replica of Mrs. Otway's?"
"Oh no," said Val, with a pleased confidence, "there was never anybody just like _us_ before."
"No doubt we are 'the peculiar people," said Mrs. Gano, calmly deserting her first postulate, and seeming quite equal to facing "the comic laugh."
"I mean," said Val, "that if there never was any 'me' in the world before, the world's a different place now there's 'me' in it."
"You have Goethe on your side, my dear," said her father. "Goethe says Nature is always interesting because she's always renewing the observer."
"I like my way of putting it best," the girl maintained--"sounds more interesting."
"I've found out, Val," said Ethan, "that most people who make believe that human nature is everywhere the same, and that we're all as alike as pins in a row, usually except themselves. That shows they're wiser than their theories."