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Updated: June 5, 2025
It was difficult to speak even to Mother about wood-ladies without a pretence of skepticism. "I forgot about lunch," she said, taking the slim, cool hand which Mother held out to her. "Joan's in there." She nodded at the bushes. "Is she?" said Mother, and called aloud in her singing voice that was so clear to hear in the spaces of the wood. "Joan! Joan!"
"Wood-ladies," repeated Joyce, and turned with a little shiver to look across the ferns to where the pines ended and the lesser wood, dense with undergrowth, broke at their edge like a wave on a steep beach. It was there, in a tunnel of a path that writhed beneath over-arching bushes, that she had been troubled with the sense of unseen companions.
But to all the calling there was no answer, no distant cheery bellow to guide them to Joan. "I wish she wouldn't play these tricks," said Mother. "I don't like them a bit." "I expect she's hiding," said Joyce. "There aren't wood-ladies really, are there, Mother?" "There's nothing worse in these woods than a rather naughty baby," Mother replied. "We'll go back by the path and call her again."
Joan, her fat hands struggling with another fern, followed her glance. "That's where they are," she said casually. "They like being in the dark." "Joan!" Joyce spoke earnestly. "Say truly truly, mind! do you think there is wood-ladies at all?" "'Course there is," replied Joan, cheerfully. "Fairies in fields and angels in heaven and dragons in caves and wood-ladies in woods."
There, the dimness was like the shadow of a presence; as babies they had been aware of it, and answered their own questions by inventing wood-ladies to float among the trunks and people the still, green chambers. Now, neither of them could remember how they had first learned of wood-ladies.
"But there aren't any wood-ladies really, darling," remonstrated Mother. "There is," said Joan. "There's lots. They wanted to keep me but I wouldn't stay. So I comed home, 'cause I was hungry." "But," began Mother. "Where did they take you to?" she asked. "I don't know," said Joan. "The one what I went to speak to gave me her hand and tooked me to where there was more of them.
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