Page:Pratt portraits - sketched in a New England suburb (IA prattportraitssk00full).pdf/44

 she had been silently talking things over rather than offering praise or supplication. Yet these prolonged statements of her case before a perfect Intelligence often brought her to a better understanding of her own needs and her own best course than she could otherwise have reached. If her religious rites lacked piety, they were at least alive with conscience. And though all her children were remembered in these secret communings, little Lucy's name was so unsuggestive of perplexities that it rarely received more than a passing mention.

One brilliant winter's day Lucy came down stairs arrayed in her squirrel tippet and muff, and wearing a little squirrel cap which sat jauntily on her bright brown hair. She had a fine color, and as she stopped at the sitting-room door to say that she was going over to see Grandma and Aunt Betsy, her mother was struck by her good looks. Indeed, so pleasant was the impression she received that Harriet, usually rather unsusceptible to merely "skin-deep" charms, got up from her chair, and still holding her sewing in her hand, stepped to the window to look out. Lucy lingered for a moment at the top of the long flight of stone steps, down which she then passed with a pretty, swaying motion all her own. "Little Lucy" had a good height, and was in other respects more like her mother than any one had yet discovered. As she reached the driveway below she turned abruptly, with a remark-