She looked at the key quite a long time. She turned it over and over,
and thought about it. As I have said before, she was not a child who had
been trained to ask permission or consult her elders about things. All
she thought about the key was that if it was the key to the closed
garden, and she could find out where the door was, she could perhaps
open it and see what was inside the walls, and what had happened to the
old rose-trees. It was because it had been shut up so long that she
wanted to see it. It seemed as if it must be different from other places
and that something strange must have happened to it during ten years.
Besides that, if she liked it she could go into it every day and shut
the door behind her, and she could make up some play of her own and play
it quite alone, because nobody would ever know where she was, but would
think the door was still locked and the key buried in the earth. The
thought of that pleased her very much.
Ever since reading 'The Secret Garden' as a child, I have held a fascination with keys and the possibilities they offer. A rusty old trunk containing memories, a door to a secret hideaway, the unsurpassed excitement of owning your very own house; a key can offer so much to a dreamer like me!
Jo x
