Page:I Know a Secret (1927).pdf/190

 earliest spring, too fair for steady thought. She looked at the shining fringe of breakers and heard their clean hiss on the pebbles. (She was only three.) "Snow," she said, "Snow saying, Sorrow to come in."

She knows a secret. Perhaps once we knew it too.

Darker occasions—when there are beans or spinach to be finished. The old family cry: Finach your spinach! Steadfast unshakeable passive resistance. "You make me sad! Do you want me to burst right open?" Very well, Blythe, no chocolate cake if you don't finish your vegetables. A slow steaming of tears in those dark eyes. (And gosh, what eyelashes!) Blythe, go and look at the doorknob, see if there isn't a smile there. There's a glass door-handle, just her height, on a door that has a mirror in it. According to legend a Special Smile lives on that doorknob. The trick is that when Blythe goes there to look for the smile on the knob, she sees herself in the tall mirror behind it. And in her grim unspinachable mood she looks so comic that she herself bursts into a grin. Well then, did you find it? She climbs again, smiling but business-like, into the high