I believe there are monsters born in the world to human parents, Some you can see, misshapen and horrible, with huge heads or tiny bodies; some arc born with no arms, no legs, some with three arms, some with tails or mouths in odd places.  They are accidents and no one's fault, as used to be thought.  Once they were considered the visible punishments for concealed sins.

And just as there are physical monsters, can there not be mental or psychic monsters born?  The face and body may be perfect, but if a twisted gene or a malformed egg can produce physical monsters, may not the same process produce a malformed soul?

Monsters are variations from the accepted normal to a greater or a less degree.  As a child may be born without an arm, so one may be born without kindness or the potential of conscience.  A man who loses his arms in an accident has a great struggle to adjust himself to the lack, but one born without arms suffers only from people who find him strange.  Having never had arms, he cannot miss them.  Sometimes when we are little we imagine how it would be to have wings, but there is no reason to suppose it is the same feeling birds have.  No, to a monster the norm must seem monstrous, since everyone is normal to himself.  To the inner monster it must be even more obscure, since he has no visible thing to compare with others.  To a man born without conscience, a soul-stricken man must seem ridiculous.  To a criminal, honesty is foolish.  You must not forget that a monster is only a variation, and that to a monster the norm is monstrous.

It is my belief that Cathy Ames was born with the tendencies, or lack of them, which drove and forced her all of her life.  Some balance wheel was misweighted, some gear out of ratio.  She was not like other people, never was from birth.  And just as a cripple may learn to utilize his lack so that he becomes more effective in a  limited field than the uncrippled, so did Cathy, using her difference, make a painful and bewildering stir in her world.

There was a time when a girl like Cathy would have been called possessed by the devil.  She would have been exorcised to cast out the evil spirit, and if after many trials that did not work, she would have been burned as a witch for the good of the community.  The one thing that may not be forgiven a witch is her ability to distress people, to make them restless and uneasy and even envious.

As though nature concealed a trap, Cathy had from the first a face of innocence.  Her hair was gold and lovely; wide-set hazel eyes with upper lids that drooped made her look mysteriously sleepy.  Her nose was delicate and thin, and her cheekbones high and wide, sweeping down to a small chin so that her face was heart-shaped.  Her mouth was well shaped and well lipped but abnormally small - what used to be called a rosebud.  Her ears were very little, without lobes, and they pressed so close to her head that even with her hair combed up they made no silhouette.  They were thin flaps sealed against her head.

Cathy always had a child's figure even after she was grown, slender, delicate arms and hands - tiny hands.  Her breasts never developed very much.  Before her puberty the nipples turned inward.  Her mother had to manipulate them out when they became painful in Cathy's tenth year.  Her body was a boy's body, narrow-hipped, straight-legged, but her ankles were thin and straight without being slender.  Her feet were small and round and stubby, with fat insteps almost like little hoofs.  She was a pretty child and she became a pretty woman.  Her voice was huskily soft, and it could be so sweet as to be irresistible.  But there must have been some steel cord in her throat, for Cathy's voice could cut like a file when she wished.

Even as a child she had some quality that made people look at her, then look away, then look back at her, troubled at something foreign.  Something looked out of her eyes, and was never there when one looked again.  She moved quietly and talked little, but she could enter no room without causing everyone to turn toward her.

She made people uneasy but not so that they wanted to go away from her.  Men and women wanted to inspect her, to be close to her, to try to find what caused the disturbance she distributed so subtly.  And since this had always been so, Cathy did not find it strange.