band of
violets not so much in keeping with the gray of the austere November
day as with the blue of her faded autumnal eyes. Her eyes were
autumnal, but it was not from this, or from the lines of maturity
graven on the passing prettiness of her little face, that the notion
and the name of Mother-Bird suggested itself. She became known as the
Mother-Bird to the tender ironic fancy of the earliest, if not the
latest, of her friends, because she was slight and small, and like a
bird in her eager movements, and because she spoke so instantly and so
constantly of her children in Dresden: before you knew anything else
of her you knew that she was going out to them.

She was quite alone, and she gave the sense of claiming their
protection, and sheltering herself in the fact of them. When she
mentioned her daughters she had the effect of feeling herself
chaperoned by them. You could not go behind them and find her wanting
in the social guarantees which women on steamers, if not men, exact of
lonely birds of passage who are not mother-birds. One must respect the
convention by which she safeguarded herself and tried to make good her
standing; yet it did not lastingly avail her with other birds of
passage, so far as they were themselves mother-birds, or sometimes
only maiden-birds. The day had not ended before they began to hold her
off by slight liftings of their wings and rufflings of their feathers,
by quick, evasive flutterings, by subtle ignorances of her approach,
which convinced no one but themselves that they had not seen her. She
sailed with the sort of acquaintance-in-common which every one shares
on a ship leaving port, when people are confused by the kindness of
friends coming to see them off after sending baskets of fruit and
sheaves of flowers, and scarcely know what they are doing or saying.
But when the ship was abreast of Fire Island, and the pilot had gone
over the side, these provisional intimacies of the parting hour began
to restrict themselves. Then the Mother-Bird did not know half the
women she had known at the pier, or quite all the men.

It was not that she did anything obvious to forfeit this knowledge.
Her behavior was if anything too exemplary; it might be thought to
form a reproach to others. Perhaps it was the unseasonable band of
violets around her hat-brim; perhaps it was the vernal gaiety of her
dress; perhaps it was the uncertainty of her anxious eyes, which
presumed while they implored. A mo