hing was very hard for a little girl to
understand, and she dared ask no questions.

Everybody seemed to be very angry, and yet not at her. Indeed, she took
the most prodigious care to avoid doing anything naughty lest she
concentrate on herself this now widely diffused disapprobation. Never in
her life had she tried so hard to be good, but nobody paid the least
attention to her--nobody but the new man and 'Stashie, and they weren't
the angry ones. The others stood about in groups in corners, talking in
voices that started in to be low and always got loud before they
stopped. Ariadne added several new words to her vocabulary at this time,
from hearing them so constantly repeated. When her dolls were bad now,
she shook them and called them "Indecent! indecent!" and asked them,
with as close an imitation as she could manage, of Great-Aunt
Hollister's tone, "What _do_ you suppose people are thinking! What _do_
you suppose people are thinking!" Or she knocked them into a corner and
said "Shocking! Shocking!"

One day she stopped Uncle Marius, hurrying past her up the stairs, and
asked him: "What are you thinking of, Uncle Marius?"

"What am I thinking of? What do you mean?" he repeated, his face and
eyes twitching the way they did when he couldn't understand something
right off.

"Why, Auntie Madeleine keeps asking everybody all the time, 'What _can_
the doctor be thinking of?' I just wondered."

He bent to kiss her raspingly--there were stiff little stubby white
hairs coming out all over his face--and he said, as he trotted on up the
stairs, "I am thinking of making sure that you have a mother, my poor
dear."

And then there was a bigger change one day. She went to bed in her own
little crib, and when she woke up she wasn't there at all, but in a big
bed in a room at Aunt Julia's; and Aunt Julia was smiling at her, and
hugging her, and saying she was so glad she had come to live with her
and Uncle Marius for a while. Ariadne found out that Uncle Marius had
brought her and Muvver the night before in a carriage all the way from
Bellevue. She regretted excessively that she had not been awake to enjoy
the adventure.

At Aunt Julia's, things were quieter. All at once the other people, the
other uncles and aunts, had disappeared. That, of course, was because
she and Muvver were at Aunt Julia's. She conceived of the house in
Bellevue as still filled with their angry faces and voices, still
echoing to "Indecent! indecent!