Century Magazine/Volume 88/Issue 6/A Child’s Heart

A CHILD'S HEART
BY MARY HEATON VORSE
Author of "The Heart's Country," etc.
PICTURE BY WILLIAM VAN DRESSER

THIS story was told me by an old friend of mine—told me to use, so I can give it without scruple. But, after all, I don't know if one could call it a story, for life, as it happens, fails often to have a recognizable pattern, like the orderly things called stories which we print in books; for you may bleed your heart out and finally die of the wound, and yet the pain of which you die, the drama which caused your heart to bleed, will have had neither logical beginning nor definite end, and in the whole course of it, though it has been life and death to you, there will have been none of those first aids to the reader—suspense, dramatic contrast, or plot. You have suffered and died, but it has n't made a story.
So instead of pretending that this is a story at all, I will call it "A Child's Heart"; for, as I listened, it seemed to me that I saw deep into the heart of a very little girl, but a different sort of child from the one I had been. So, after all, this tale without beginning or end had given me a new horizon about childhood, since we are apt to interpret by our own all t

Đọc bản gốc tại Wikisource tiếng Anh