Girlchild

The male is esteemed "the head of the family;" it belongs to him; he maintains it; and the rest of the world is a wide hunting ground and battlefield wherein he competes with other males as of old. ¶ The girl-child, peering out, sees this forbidden field as belonging wholly to men-kind; and her relation to it is to secure one for herself—not only that she may love, but that she may live.

She had a baby slung on her back in a shawl, a girl child clinging to her skirts, and a heavy-faced boy plodding behind her.

"Patróklos, why all the weeping? Like a small girlchild who runs beside her mother and cried and cries to be taken up, and catches at her gown, and will not let her go, looking up in tears until she has her wish: that's how you seem, Patróklos, winking out your glimmering tears.

In the final, affirming piece, "They Tell Me...Now I Know," the girlchild narrator begins menstruation, thus undergoing her rite of passage into womanhood.