A Renegade Mother

T WAS a summer morning such as only Scarsett might know, breeze-swept, dew-moistened, sun-drenched,, flower-scented. The scene oozed domesticity at every pore.

Nobody would have suspected that it was forerunner to anarchy in the life of Jane Elizabeth Blair.

Mrs. Blair and Mrs. Benton sat at one end of the piazza, sewing. The new Benton baby napped in a blue bassinet at his mother's side. George Meredith, a big white English bulldog, snored apoplectically in the shade of Mrs. Blair's skirts. In a glaring patch of sunlight not, far off, Henry James, a monster Maltese cat, luxuriously sharpened his claws. At the other end of the piazza, Caroline Benton, a mouse-like chunk of five-year-old girl, sang as she rocked her doll to sleep. And in the roomy canvas hammock Janey swung and meditated and meditated and swung.

From the big square white house the Blair place sloped down the side of a cliff. Beyond, between yellow. beach-road and gray main-traveled road, lay marsh lands. Here the Scarsett River coiled and looped like a great silver serpent crawling over.a green velvet carpet. Beyond this, distances melted, colors fused; the landscape hung flat like a back-drop. In the south rose the Bigelow hills, tenderly curved, treeless, mottled with bayberry. In the north spread the Scarsett Harbor, a luminous blue streaked with pearl. Pointed by its three trim steeples and pricked out with flashes of white clapboarding and green blinds, the village hid in a smother of trees, directly west. Nothing moved but a load of hay crawling into the leafy tunnel of the great elms on the cross-road. Nothing sounded but the town-clock striking eight.

In a pause in which she left off meditating in order to resume swinging, Janey caught her name drifting through the conversation of the two mothers.

“Yes,” Mrs. Blair was saying, “Janey hasn't developed one bit since last summer. All the other children have begun to grow up. At least Elsa Morgan has, and Pink and Colette. Isn't it amusing to see them beginning to take notice of boys? Oh, how delighted I shall be when Janey is old enough to go to dances and have pretty clothes! Mrs. Morgan feels quite differently about it. She's heart-broken because Elsa has stopped playing with dolls. But it's a curious thing about Janey: the older she gets, the more she clings to her dolls—even old black Dinah, that she's had ever since she was born.”

Mrs. Benton's gentle voice broke in here. “Yes, but Miriam, I'd prefer that if she were my child. She's so precocious in some ways that she really frightens me. But you've only to see her with dolls to realize what a baby she is. With a mind like hers, I'd keep her down as long as I could.”

“Keep her down with Jim Warriner always talking to her exactly as if she were grown up!” Mrs. Blair protested. “Well, I must confess I'll be glad when she is out of her doll period. 1 never cared for dolls myself. It bores me so to have to make clothes for them.”

The talk passed from one tiresome grown-up subject to another. Janey ceased to listen. Much of what the two ladies said had passed over her head. But she caught the drift. It left her in the grip of an acute mortification. For it made perfectly clear to her a situation which had puzzled her now for many days.

In previous summers, all the little girls of Scarsett had played together in a group of which Janey, although the youngest, was an honored member. They had been bound to her and she to them by a common passion for dolls. When Janey parted with them the previous fall everything had been all right. When they met this spring everything was all wrong. Something strange had happened during the interval, for now they were no longer contemporaries. Mrs. Blair's words cleared up the mystery. The answer was—dolls and boys. The other girls had discarded dolls. They had taken up boys.

Dolls!

Why, Janey could not exist without dolls. She and Caroline had always taken their maternal duties very seriously, and the recent arrival of the Benton baby had fired both young mothers with a fresh enthusiasm. In the care of their numerous progeny they aped sedulously Mrs. Benton's system with Brother.

Immediately after breakfast, all the dolls were bathed and dressed. Then came an airing on the piazza, broken by pauses for rest and refreshment. All the morning, in fact, the dolls were trained according to the latest and most scientific methods of baby-culture. The afternoons were filled with gory adventures both by sea and land. At night the dolls were undressed again, made to say their prayers, and stowed away in a line of tiny couches which extended along one whole side of the nursery. In order to grow up, then, you must give up dolls. Janey's heart sank. If she and Caroline were to do that, what in the world would they do with themselves all day long!

“Janey! Janey!” a boy's voice called suddenly.

Janey sat upright. Kim Morgan was passing.

“The Tillinghasts are coming back,” Kim yelled. “They're coming down by the nine train this morning—they'll be here at half-past ten.'

“Oh, goody!”” Janey exclaimed. She forgot her own problem in the rapture with which children always welcome the prospect of more children. But Kim, passing on, seemed to take her new joy with him. What booted it, after all, that there were to be two more grown-up girls and two more mere babies in their midst?

Every child in the summer colony in Scarsett pitied the Tillinghast children profoundly. They of the summer colony managed to exist through long, dull, cruel winters for the sake of the short, glorious, exciting summers. It is true that relentless parents sometimes dragged them elsewhere for brief August visits, but furious picture post-card correspondence kept them in constant touch with the real center of civilization. With the Tillinghast children, whose wretched parents were painters, Scarsett was often an impossibility. In consequence, Ida and Faith and Freddie and Sammy-Boy dragged out a chain-gang existence, oscillating between London and Paris, the Grecian archipelago and the Nile.

“Ida'll be almost a young lady in long dresses—she can't play with me,” thought Janey, considering the news, as females will, entirely in relation to herself, “And Faith'll be almost fourteen—she won't play with me. Ida and Faith will play with Elsa Morgan's crowd. And Freddie and Sammy-Boy are babies. Why—why—they won't be babies any longer. Freddie'll be ten and Sammy-Boy'll be almost six!”

And then it was that a big idea came to Janey—came to her in a blinding flash. An instant she sat silent, tense, her eyes fixed, her hands clenched. Social schemes of a dynasty-making quality sizzled in her head. Then she leaped out of the hammock, ran the length of the piazza and plumped down at her cousin's side.

“Caroline Benton!” She apostrophised her cousin so explosively that Caroline nearly jumped out of her skin. “Do you know what I've been thinking?”

Caroline shook her head. This was Janey's most frequent mode of address. But Caroline had never yet succeeded in reading Janey's active mind.

“I've been thinking it was time we got over being such teeny-weeny little bits of girls and grew up and became young ladies—well, sorter young ladies, you understand. Like Elsa Morgan and Pink Hollis and Colette Kingdon. How would you like that?”

“I'd like it,” Caroline said without excitement. “You understand, Caroline Benton,” Janey said in an ominous tone, “what being sorter a young lady means. It means that we can't do a whole lot of things that we do now. We can't play floating-out-to-sea-on-a-raft or shipwrecked-on-a-deserrt-island or being-rescued-from-the-top-window-in-a-fire. And we must give up—” Janey paused dramatically. She regarded Caroline with the austere air of one who puts a comrade to the final test. Caroline's eyes grew bright with a half-frightened anticipation.

“—dolls!” The word popped from Janey's mouth like a bean from a bean-blower.

Caroline clutched her doll tight, so tight that nothing. but rubber would have survived the pressure. Her face shadowed; then it lightened. You could always depend on Janey. If she repudiated dolls, it would be only for the sake of something else quite as marvelous.

“We must put them all away up-attic and never look at them again as long as we live,” Janey continued relentlessly.

By this time, Caroline was beaming over the tragic splendors of this new game. She went Janey one better, so to speak. “Leth's put them up-achick now,” she suggested.

Janey caught her breath. Perhaps she had thought the final sacrifice would not come so soon. Then her eyes caught fire from Caroline's. “Let's,” she agreed. With one impulse the two little girls tore into the house and scrambled up-stairs to the nursery.

“Find every doll you own, Caroline Benton,” Janey commanded, “and bring them all to my room.”

Ensued fifteen minutes of feverish activity—then a cone-like heap of rejected offsprings on the bed. One in rag, two in rubber, three in celluloid, four in wood, five in china, six in bisque and seven thousand in paper, they, their wardrobes, their household goods, their personal appurtenances were carted up-stairs. Janey laid them out carefully on a shadowy shelf close to the eaves, old, black, rag-doll Dinah heading the row.

“I don't mind putting Dinah away at all,” Janey said in the height of her self-scorn. “I should have given her up long ago. Nobody but little girls play with rag-babies. But when it comes to Elinor—” Janey lifted a golden-haired bisque she-giant on to her lap and fondled her passionately. “She's my latest one and I 'spect I love her most. Uncle Jim gave her to me. He and I picked her out together. We got the biggest one we could find. She's most as big as me. Now Caroline, kiss all your children good-by for I don't suppose we'll ever see them agan until we have children of our own.”

That ceremony performed, “Good-by, babies,” Janey murmured, and “Good-by babieth,” Caroline echoed.

“You think that's all we're going to do to get grown up,” Janey informed her small sycophant in a tone blended in equal parts of mystery and triumph, “but it's only a part of it. You wait, Caroline Benton, and see.”

The Tillinghasts arrived at ten-thirty. At ten-thirty-five Janey called.

Mr. Tillinghast, a tall blond giant in knickerbockers, was removing the storm shutters from the lower windows.

“Well, Janey Blair,” he remarked, seizing her and performing Indian club exercises in mid-air with her small body, “Sure and certain I'm glad to see you. What ever put it into your head to grow up into the Velasquez Infanta?”

This was enigmatic. But, as was her habit, when grown-up language was incomprehensible, Janey dismissed the allusion with a Mona Lisa smile as one who intimates, “I could say much on this subject an' I would,” and came at once to terms. “Where's Freddie?”

“My spirit-control tells me he's having his face washed.”

There was nothing in the least clairvoyant about Mr. Tillinghast's conclusions. Sounds, all too audible and unmistakable in their import, floated down from the bath-room, ending with the martyr-cry:

“Well, mother, if you were going to wash me after we got here, why did you wash me just before we started?”

Janey recognized the justice of this. She had made similiar [sic] complaints against the perverted adult idea of cleanliness which washed her face just before she went to bed and then wastefully repeated the process the moment she got up. Her heart warmed to the victim of a foolish tradition. But when, all rosy from the irritations of the towel, the hero of the occasion appeared, she was conscious of a vague feeling of disappointment.

Freddie was a stocky, dark, pop-eyed lad with a supercilious eyelid, a contumacious nostril and a perpetual look of baffled curiosity. The carriage of his body radiated self-importance.

“Hullo, Freddie.” Thus Janey bridged the chasm of their two years' separation.

And, “Hullo, Janey,” Freddie answered.

“Come over to my house to play and bring Sammy-Boy?” Janey asked.

Freddie was nothing if not literal. “How long are we to stay?” he asked.

“All day. My little cousin Caroline Benton's there. She's five. I've something very particklar I want to talk with you about.”

Obviously, the suggestion of mystery got Freddie. Without any warning, he raised his voice to an altitude salutatory of the furthest star. “Marmar, can I go over to Janey Blair's house and take Sammy-Boy to stay all day and play with her and her little cousin Caroline Benton, who's five, because she's got something very particular she wants to talk over with me?”

Answer came at once. “Stop that yelling, Freddie. Sam Tillinghast, can you stand there and let that boy bellow so?' A pretty brunette face, tied up in a white towel, and a triangle of olive throat bounded by a blue kimono, appeared at an upper window. “Oh, Janey Blair, what a darling you are. If I don't do you before the summer is through!”

Janey's heart sank. There was only one of God's creatures whom she really hated and that was a painter. And she would not have minded them, if they had not always insisted on “doing” her. She strove to smile.

“That's right, bear up, Janey!” were Mr. Tillinghast's cruel words of encouragement. “There's plenty coming to you. For just as soon as the Missus gets through, I'm going to take a hack at you myself.”

“Yes, you may go,” Mrs. Tillinghast was saying to Freddie. “Give Mrs. Blair my love and tell her to send you home the moment you're bad, which will be the instant you get there, to judge from the way you've acted this morning.”

“Yes, marmar,” Freddie answered in the dulled accents which soothe mothers. “Sammy-Boy!” he screeched suddenly, having paid his toll of consideration to adult ears.

Sammy-Boy appeared. He was very different from Freddie. He was little. He was slender. He was angelic. Flaxen curls blew off his forehead. Big blue eyes fixed themselves in serious examination on Janey's face.

Janey immediately recognized the only masculine type she could endure. Gentle, tender, innocent—Sammy-Boy could be led about by the nose.

“Hullo, Sammy-Boy,” she said in the saccharin tones which she reserved for the really young. “What a nice little boy you've grown to be! I remember perfickly, Sammy-Boy, when you were nothing but a baby. Take my hand, dear, and we'll go over to the house now.”

Rarely had Sammy-Boy been so skilfully patronized. He fairly clung to the hand Janey held out. And until that day's sun set, he hardly removed his awed blue eyes from Janey's face.

Caroline descried the procession from the piazza and raced to join it.

“I have something to tell you, children, that's a secret,” Janey announced in tones of honey. “Let's go to the fairy pond where we won't be interruckted.”

The “fairy pond” was a mud-hole, surrounded by big rocks and high bushes, ornamenting one corner of the Blair place.

“Sit down!” Janey ordered. The children dropped as if props had suddenly been knocked from under them. Janey ensconced herself where she could look into their faces.

“Now, children,” she began dulcetly, “what I'm going to tell you is very important and you must listen hard. In the first place we're going to start right this minute to stop being children and get grown-up. We're going to be a crowd. Do you understand? Freddie is the crowd and I'm the crowd, and Caroline, you and Sammy-Boy are the crowd. Whenever anybody asks you where you're going, you must say: 'I'm going off with the crowd.' Do you understand?”

The “'crowd” nodded. Freddie, lolling against a rock, curled a patronizing lip. “I've belonged to many a crowd,” he averred.

“But you must understand one thing,” Janey went on, ignoring Freddie's claim to omniscience. “It's all a secret—I mean what we do or say. You mustn't tell anybody. You mustn't tell—” She paused and fluttered visibly for a stronger phrase. Losing her grammatical bearings, she clinched her ukase in the easiest way possible. “You mustn't tell nobody.”

Again the crowd” nodded. But a look of alarm was growing in Sammy-Boy's angelic eyes. “Can't I tell marmar?” he asked.

Janey's teeth came together in an exasperating click. This was what came of association with minors—they would drag mothers in. But she managed to suppress all oral signs of irritation. “If she asks you,” she said, employing strategy. “Now there's another crowd in Scarsett. Elsa Morgan's in it and Cordy West and Pink Hollis and Edward Hollis and a whole lot more boys and girls. But we are to have nothing to do with them—do you understand?”

“I wouldn't belong to their old crowd,” Freddie said scornfully. He arched still further his contumacious nostril. “Not if they paid me.”

“When you're a crowd, you act very different.” Janey's air was that of one who having talked theory for a while, comes gratefully down to hard facts. “And you don't believe in foolish things any longer like fairies and Santa Claus and putting salt on birds' tails.”

“But we must believe in Jonah and things in Sunday-school, mustn't we?” Freddie said, putting obstacles in the way of iconoclasm, after the fashion of the unoriginal.

“Oh, of course!” Janey's tone was shocked “We must believe everything in Sunday-school. Why, we can't be—be—be—” Janey cast unavailingly about in her vocabulary for a fearful term of aspersion. In despair, she borrowed, but without comprehension, from Uncle Jim. “We can't be bromides,” she ended.

The “crowd” looked horrified. Undoubtedly, to turn bromide was to go beyond the pale.

“Now, besides being a crowd,” Janey hurried past what had nearly been her Waterloo, “we must be beaux and girls. Caroline, you are to be Sammy-Boy's girl and Freddie, I'm going to be your girl.” She paused to note the effect of this edict.

Caroline received it with the docility with which she received all Janey-made mandates.

Sammy-Boy's angelic eyes grew round, as though life had suddenly unloosed heavy responsibilities.

Freddie seemed only a little more visibly to swell with importance. “I've got a girl in London,” he said, “and another in Paris. I don't know as I ought to have one in Scarsett.”

Janey's look discovered no rancor, but her small face froze to its steeliest look of determination. “You've got to have me for your girl or leave the crowd, Freddie,” she remarked.

Freddie back-pedalled hastily. “All right. I don't know that I've got to tell them,” he said, reverting to his private perplexities.

Apparently, there was no sting for Janey even in this. Perhaps hers was an engagement of convenience.

“Now the first thing we have to do,” she went smoothly on, “is to give each other something. Sammy-Boy, what can you give Caroline?”

Sammy-Boy considered this problem with the encouraging earnestness with which he had taken the whole situation. “A boxth of A-B-Thee blockths,” he said at last.

“I shall give Janey a ring that I got in a box of candy in Rome,” remarked the Don Juan of the crowd.

“That's fine, Freddie.” For the first time Janey approved her fiancé. “A ring's the best thing, I think. I shall give you a tie that Uncle Jim gave me for my dolls.” She addressed herself to the “crowd” again. “After this, we must walk everywhere together and we must laugh and talk all the time. We must have secrets. That's the most troublesome thing. I shall have to think up a whole lot of secrets. Elsa Morgan's crowd all wear blue ribbons about their ankles when they go in bathing. Of course we don't want to do just what they do, but, maybe, we can draw something on our arms with colored chalk and p'tend it's been tattooed. And then, Caroline, you and I must make something for the boys. Elsa Morgan's crowd made ties, but mother says I'm too little to crochet, so I say we make daisy chains. Let's go and pick the daisies now.”

At the prospect of action at last, the “crowd” leaped to its feet.

“Remember, Freddie and Sammy-Boy,” Janey said as they entered the daisy-field, “that you must always walk and talk with your girl and help her over fences. And remember,” she added, as they emerged at sunset after an afternoon of exhausting floral occupation, “the crowd meets right after breakfast to-morrow at my house.”

“I may be a little late,” Freddie said, resorting to male coquetry. “I promised my girl in London that I'd write to her as soon as I got to Scarsett.”

But even this did not draw blood. In fact, Janey brightened perceptibly, for among her other accomplishments was the art of ready letter-writing. “Do it over to my house,” she said; “if you can't think of anything, I'll tell you what to say. If she's a nice little girl, Ill write too.”

Unquestionably, Janey's was an engagement of convenience.

Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday went by. The “crowd,” in good running order now, was a model machine. Each day it followed a program which deviated not a hair's breadth from that of the day before.

In the morning it went to the post-office. It marched two by two, Janey and Freddie in the front, Caroline and Sammy-Boy in the rear.

On the road it always met Elsa Morgan and her crowd. Janey's “Hullo!” thrown at random into it was a marvel of nonchalant triumph, on which the indifference of their answering “Hullo, kids!” made not even a scratch.

Every morning or every afternoon, according as the tide served, they went in bathing. And bathing was a gracefully managed affair nowadays, patterned closely—except for deep-sea swimming—on that of Elsa Morgan's crowd. They lay about on the hot sands in their bathing suits, interrupting their talk to take an occasional dip and interrupting their bathing to take up their conversation exactly where they had left it. In the time between they took long, sedate walks up the road and across the cliffs, or Janey read aloud, or they sat about the fairy pond and indulged in instructive causerie.

Janey sustained a high order of conversation, to which it must be confessed that Freddie, trained cosmopolite that he was, was a little inadequate. But what Freddie lacked in psychological insight and in philosophic depth, he made up in foreign allusion. Caroline and Sammy-Boy, trotting to keep up, drank avidly from these Olympian springs.

“Caroline, dear, you should talk to Sammy-Boy,” Janey remonstrated once.

“But, Janey, I want to hear what you're thaying,” Caroline said naively.

“And tho do I,” added Sammy-Boy.

By the end of two days Sammy-Boy and Caroline had quite accepted this smooth, suave existence. Freddie was in his element. He had actually begun to dress the part. On a previous Christmas somebody had given him a little cane. He carried it always now and swung it in perfect imitation of his father, who never walked without a stick. Janey, herself, conscientiously went over every day with colored chalks the tattoo marks which, on wrist and ankle, constituted the secret insignia of the “crowd.” She conscientiously wore Freddie's ring. Every two days she conscientiously hunted up something to give Freddie. Every third day Freddie responded in kind.

Life was perfect.

And yet—

“Caroline Benton,” Janey said one day, “don't you miss your dollies?”

“No,” Caroline said placidly, “I don't. I love the 'crowd' better than anything I ever played. Don't you, Janey?”

“Oh, of course,” Janey said with a suspicious surplusage of emphasis. “But do you mean to tell me, Caroline Benton, that you don't ever think of your babies all alone up in that hot attic?”

“No,” Caroline said, “I don't. How soon will the 'crowd' meet again, Janey?”

Ah, yes, life was perfect.

But—

“Child High-Brow,” said Uncle Jim, “will you tell your poor old purblind, doting Uncle Jim what it is that you find so fascinating about that slick, pompous, self-adoring, insufferable little donkey of a Fred Tillinghast? It's all I can do to keep rude hands off him when he's about.”

Uncle Jim wrote novels and was, of course, a person not at all to be taken seriously. And so Janey, who knew exactly what he meant, and knew, moreover, that he knew that she knew exactly what he meant—their understanding of each other being fairly hypnotic—answered:

“Uncle Jim, I think you're horrid. Freddie is a very nice little boy and I like him.”

And again Uncle Jim, three mornings hand-running: “Child High-Brow, why grouchest thou?”

Whereupon Janey: “Uncle Jim, I'm perfickly happy. I never had such a good time in my life.'

At which Uncle Jim shook his head and said, “It is interesting to observe that the tendency toward self-deception in females is congenital.”

Janey's state of mind was more accurately described by Caroline, who, in the process of being put to bed, discoursed thus to her mother.

“Muvver, Janey was dreffle naughty to-day. She thaid she hated everybody in the world. She thaid she hated God.”

“Mercy, Caroline,” Mrs. Benton said absently, “what are you talking about? Don't leave your shoes and stockings in that heap.”

“That wasthn't all, muvver,” Caroline said in a hushed tone. “She thaid she hated her muvver.”

“That was very, very naughty, Caroline.” Mrs. Benton tried to make up in emphasis by a very perceptible preoccupation with the top drawer of her bureau. “Don't ever let me hear you say anything like that.”

“No, muvver. But that wasthn't all, muvver.” Caroline had the air of an accomplice freeing her mind by confession of unbearable mental anguish. “She thaid”—Caroline's voice dropped to tones of horror—“she thaid she hated George Washington!”

Once, coming up-stairs after the children had been put to bed, Uncle Jim came across Janey in her long white night-gown, candle in hand, trailing down the steep stairs from the attic.

“Well, Janey Blair, what do you mean by doing a Lady Macbeth act this rainy night?” he inquired. He scooped her up on one bear-paw palm to the level of his chest and carried her thus to bed.

“I was afraid the rain might come through the cracks on my dollies,” Janey explained. “I go up-attic every rainy night and cover them up and I go up every hot night and uncover them. You know, Uncle Jim, I've given up playing with dolls for good, but I still take an interest in them.”

Friday, Saturday, Sunday went by. The “crowd” met regularly morning and afternoon. Janey began to wear the look of the hunted. It might have been observed that she averted her eyes when Mrs. Benton bathed or fed Brother.

Sunday night, Janey lay awake what seemed to her a long, long time thinking of the morrow. It would bring little Caroline's parrot-cry: “What is the 'crowd' going to do to-day, Janey?” It would twice bring Freddie—a Freddie swinging his little cane—a Freddie bursting with smug pomposity—a Freddie of whose conversation she knew the whole unillumined round.

Monday morning when Mrs. Blair called Janey, that young person said composedly, “Mother, I feel sick this morning. I don't think I'll get up.”

Mrs. Blair studied her daughter's appearance anxiously. Color fine, eyes bright, pulse normal, tongue pink as a rose-leaf, Janey could not produce a visible symptom. But she described minutely excruciating pains which seemed to tear like a whirlwind through all her small body. Mrs. Blair called her brother in. After many pointed questions, that gentleman left the sickroom with twinkling eyes and a farewell, “Goodby, Madamoiselle Malingerer.”

Janey stuck to her bed. Propped up by pillows, a pile of books at either elbow, she read aloud to Caroline the whole forenoon.

In the afternoon, Mrs. Blair consulted tearfully with Mrs. Benton just back from a trip to town. “I don't care what you say, Jim,” the children heard her say, “I'll wait one hour more and then I'll send for Dr. Bigelow.”

Whereupon Caroline had an inspiration. “Can't I go over and get Freddie and Sammy-Boy,” she piped up, “I think Janey'd like to see the 'crowd.'”

“No, Caroline,” Mrs. Blair said with firmness. She paused and then continued more gently. “Children I've something to tell you that will make you feel unhappy, I'm afraid, but you must be good children and try to make the best of it. Mr. and Mrs. Tillinghast have received orders to do so much work in Magnolia that they've decided suddenly to go down there. I don't know when you'll see Freddie and Sammy-Boy again. Now Janey, I'm going to take Caroline down-stairs and you must try to go to sleep.”

Sleep!

Uncle Jim, working in a back chamber, sensed the sound of a small body leaping from bed to floor, sensed a white flitter silently passing his door, sensed a pitter-patter, softly-joyful, on the attic stairs. The pitter-patter stopped after a long moment and changed into a prolonged murmur. In some alarm, he arose and noiselessly followed the sound.

In the middle of the attic floor sat Janey. Radiating from her in all directions lay dolls and dolls and dolls. Furthest away, face-down, neglected, sprawled Elinor, the bisque she-giant. Janey was rocking back and forth, her old black rag-doll in her arms.

“The 'crowd's busted for good, Dinah, darling,” she said, “And I'll never belong to another one again. Never, never, never! I'm going to bring you and all your little brothers and sisters down-stairs and take care of you just as long as I live.”

Something dropped from Janey's eyelashes, ran glittering down her cheek and splashed on Dinah's woolly head.