motion; surging and shrinking and dancing; the ends of her hair were
soft and loose as foam, and it had the color and shining of pure,
light gold. Commonly in the house she wore her hair loose, because her
mother liked the appearance of youth imparted by hanging hair, and
would often desire her daughter to leave off her outer skirt and walk
only in her petticoats to heighten the illusion of girlishness. Her
head was shaped very tenderly and softly; it was so small that when
her hair was twisted up on it it seemed much too delicate to bear so
great a burden. Her eyes were gray, limpidly tender and shy, drooping
under weighty lids, so that they seldom seemed more than half opened
and commonly sought the ground rather than the bolder excursions of
straightforwardness; they seldom looked for longer than a glance,
climbing and poising and eddying about the person at whom she gazed,
and then dived away again; and always when she looked at any one she
smiled a deprecation of her boldness. She had a small white face, very
like her mother's in some ways and at some angles, but the tight beak
which was her mother's nose was absent in Mary; her nose withdrew
timidly in the center and only snatched a hurried courage to become
visible at the tip. It was a nose that seemed to have been snubbed
almost out of existence. Her mother loved it because it was so little,
and had tried so hard not to be a nose at all. They often stood
together before the little glass that had a great crack running
drunkenly from the right-hand top corner down to the left-hand bottom
corner, and two small arm crosses, one a little above the other, in
the center. When one's face looked into this glass it often appeared
there as four faces with horrible aberrations; an ear might be curving
around a lip or an eye leering strangely in the middle of a chin. But
there were ways of looking into the glass which practice had discovered,
and usage had long ago dulled the terrors of its vagaries. Looking into
this glass Mrs. Makebelieve would comment minutely upon the two faces
therein, and, pointing to her own triumphantly genuine nose and the fact
that her husband's nose had been of quite discernible proportions, she
would seek in labyrinths of pedigree for a reason to justify her
daughter's lack; she passed all her sisters in this review, with an
army of aunts and great-aunts, rifling the tombs of grandparents and
their remoter blood, and making long-dead noses to live