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 got into the children. Those Mendozas! Nobody knows who they are."

"The more I tell Jodie he mustn't go there, the more he wants to."

"So does Laddie. He just up and goes!"

Opal's father was a traveling man; her mother lived hidden by dirty lace curtains. Other gentlemen were at the house a good deal when Mr. Mendoza was away, so Lizzie told Kate. Opal knew how babies came. Opal had seen her father in bed with her mother, and described what she had seen to a scarlet, bewildered group of little girls, squatting, heads together, behind a snowball bush. Opal could beat the boys in a race; she could jump rope longer than anyone, and faster ("Salt, vinegar, mustard, pepper!"), her locket with a turquoise set in a star leaping, hitting her chest. Lizzie, going past the Mendozas' on her Thursday out, had caught the enchanted Jodie turning somersaults with Opal, and had dragged him home, followed by Opal's sweet shrill chant:

"Jodie is a ba-by, and Lizzie is a bug-ger! Lizzie's a bug-ger! Lizzie's a dirty bug-ger!"

Opal's delicate skin was like satin, crusted under her small nose; her ears were dirty; her finger nails were black crescents. Lizzie said she had "things" in her matted spun-silk hair. Extravagant eyelashes curled back from eyes like drowned forget-me-nots. One Sunday, wearing a shirred pink silk bonnet trimmed with dirty white ostrich tips, she turned up at St.