petticoat.

It had been sweet to be a little girl, she thought wistfully, to have
had no past, to know only the shining present of every day with no
ominous, difficult future beyond it. Ineffably sweet too was the aroma
of perfect trust in the strength and wisdom of grown-up people, which
tinctured deep with certainty every profoundest layer of her
consciousness. Ineffably sweet . . . and lost forever. There was no human
being in the world as wise and strong as poor old Cousin Hetty had
seemed to her then. A kingdom of security from which she was now shut
out.

And the games, the fantastic plays,--how whole and rounded and entire,
the pleasure in them! She remembered the rainy day she had played
paper-dolls here once, with little Margaret Congdon . . . dead, years ago,
that much-loved playmate of past summer days . . . and how they had taken
the chest for the house for Margaret's dolls, and the hair-trunk where
she sat, for hers; how they had arranged them with the smallest of
playthings, with paste-board furniture, and bits of colored tissue paper
for rugs, and pieces of silk and linen from the rag-bag for bed-clothes;
how they had hummed and whistled to themselves as they worked (she could
hear them now!); and how the aromatic woodsy smell of the unfinished old
room and the drone of the rain on the roof had been a part of their deep
content.

Nothing had changed in that room, except the woman who sat there.

She got up with a sudden impulse, and threw back the lid of the trunk. A
faint musty odor rose from it, as though it had been shut up for very
long. And . . . why, there it was, the doll's room, just as they had left
it, how long ago! How like this house! How like Cousin Hetty never to
have touched it!

She sat down on the floor and, lifting the candle, looked in at the
yellowed old playthings, the flimsy, spineless paper-dolls, the faded
silk rags, the discolored bits of papers, the misshapen staggering
paste-board chairs and bed, which had seemed so delightful and
enchanting to her then, far better than any actual room she knew. A
homesickness for the past came over her. It was not only Margaret who
was dead. The other little girl who had played there, who had hung so
lovingly over this creation of her fancy, was dead too, Marise thought
with a backward look of longing.

And then the honest, unsparing habit of her life with Neale shook her
roughly. This was sentimentalizing. If she could, would she give u