er eyes were big
and as black as pools of ink and as bright as the eyes of a bird. Her
hair also was black, it was as smooth as the finest silk, and when
unloosened it hung straightly down, shining about her ivory face. Her
lips were thin and scarcely colored at all, and her hands were sharp,
quick hands, seeming all knuckle when she closed them and all fingers
when they were opened again.

Mary Makebelieve loved her mother very dearly, and her mother returned
her affection with an overwhelming passion that sometimes surged into
physically painful caresses. When her mother hugged her for any length
of time she soon wept, rocking herself and her daughter to and fro,
and her clutch became then so frantic that poor Mary Makebelieve found
it difficult to draw her breath; but she would not for the world have
disturbed the career of her mother's love. Indeed, she found some
pleasure in the fierceness of those caresses, and welcomed the pain
far more than she reprobated it.

Her mother went out early every morning to work, and seldom returned
home until late at night. She was a charwoman, and her work was to
scrub out rooms and wash down staircases. She also did cooking when
she was asked, and needlework when she got any to do. She had made
exquisite dresses which were worn by beautiful young girls at balls
and picnics, and fine, white shirts that great gentlemen wore when
they were dining, and fanciful waistcoats for gay young men, and silk
stockings for dancing in--but that was a long time ago, because these
beautiful things used to make her very angry when they were taken from
her, so that she cursed the people who came to take them away and
sometimes tore up the dresses and danced on them and screamed.

She used often to cry because she was not rich. Sometimes, when she
came home from work, she liked to pretend that she was rich; she would
play at imagining that some one had died and left her a great fortune,
or that her brother Patrick had come back from America with vast
wealth, and then she would tell Mary Makebelieve of the things she
intended to buy and do the very next day. Mary Makebelieve liked
that.... They were to move the first thing in the morning to a big
house with a garden behind it full of fruit trees and flowers and
birds. There would be a wide lawn in front of the house to play lawn
tennis in and to walk with delicately fine young men with fair faces
and white hands, who would speak in the French langu