life cannot cross without scarring. And
brains at their best are only a ploughed field teeming
always and forever with the worries of incalculable
harvests. Make me a little pretty, if you like, and a little
wise, but not too much of either, if you value the verities
of your Vision. There! I say: do your worst! Make me that
face, and that face only, that you _need the most_ in all
this big, lonesome world: food for your heart, or fragrance
for your nostrils. Only, one face or another--I insist upon
having _red hair_!

"MOLLY."

With his lower lip twisted oddly under the bite of his strong white
teeth, Stanton began to unwrap the various packages that comprised the
large bundle. If it was a "portrait" it certainly represented a
puzzle-picture.

First there was a small, flat-footed scarlet slipper with a fluffy
gold toe to it. Definitely feminine. Definitely small. So much for
that! Then there was a sling-shot, ferociously stubby, and rather
confusingly boyish. After that, round and flat and tantalizing as an
empty plate, the phonograph disc of a totally unfamiliar song--"The
Sea Gull's Cry": a clue surely to neither age nor sex, but indicative
possibly of musical preference or mere individual temperament. After
that, a tiny geographical globe, with Kipling's phrase--

"For to admire an' for to see,
For to be'old this world so wide--
It never done no good to me,
But I can't drop it if I tried!"--

written slantingly in very black ink across both hemispheres. Then an
empty purse--with a hole in it; a silver-embroidered gauntlet such as
horsemen wear on the Mexican frontier; a white table-doily partly
embroidered with silky blue forget-me-nots--the threaded needle still
jabbed in the work--and the small thimble, Stanton could have sworn,
still warm from the snuggle of somebody's finger. Last of all, a fat
and formidable edition of Robert Browning's poems; a tiny black
domino-mask, such as masqueraders wear, and a shimmering gilt picture
frame inclosing a pert yet not irreverent handmade adaptation of a
certain portion of St. Paul's epistle to the Corinthians:

"Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels and
have not a Sense of Humor, I am become as sounding brass, or
a tinkling symbol. And though I have the gift of
Prophecy--and all knowledge--so that I could remove
Mountains, and have not a Sense of Humor, I am n