her hair tied back from her face
with a pink ribbon in a bow on top of her head. She loosened this
ribbon, and shook her hair quite loose. She peeped out of the golden
radiance of it at herself, then she shook it back. She was charming
either way. She was undeveloped, but as yet not a speck of the mildew
of earth had touched her. She was flawless, irreproachable, except
for the knowledge of her beauty, through heredity, in her heart,
which was older than she herself.

Suddenly Maria, after a long gaze of rapture at her face in the
glass, gave a great start. She turned and saw her mother standing in
the door looking at her.

Maria, with an involuntary impulse of concealment, seized her brush,
and began brushing her hair. "I was just brushing my hair," she
murmured. She felt as guilty as if she had committed a crime.

Her mother continued to look at her sternly. "There isn't any use in
your trying to deceive me, Maria," said she. "I am ashamed that a
child of mine should be so silly. To stand looking at yourself that
way! You needn't think you are so pretty, because you are not. You
don't begin to be as good-looking as Amy Long."

Maria felt a cold chill strike her. She had herself had doubts as to
her superior beauty when Amy Long was concerned.

"You don't begin to be as good-looking as your aunt Maria was at your
age, and you know yourself how she looks now. Nobody would dream for
a minute of calling her even ordinary-looking," her mother continued
in a pitiless voice.

Maria shuddered. She seemed to see, instead of her own fair little
face in the glass, an elderly one as sallow as her mother's, but
without the traces of beauty which her mother's undoubtedly had. She
saw the thin, futile frizzes which her aunt Maria affected; she saw
the receding chin, indicative at once of degeneracy and obstinacy;
she saw the blunt nose between the lumpy cheeks.

"Your aunt Maria looked very much as you do when she was your age,"
her mother went on, with the calm cruelty of an inquisitor.

Maria looked at her, her mouth was quivering. "Did I look like Mrs.
Jasper Cone's baby that died last week when I was a baby?" said she.

"Who said you did?" inquired her mother, unguardedly.

"She did. She came up behind me with Mrs. Elliot when I was waiting
for father to get the peaches, and she said her baby that died looked
just like me; she had always thought so."

"That Cone baby look like you!" repeated Maria's mother. "Well,