neat in
their respective rooms; why she herself was dressed with such unusual
care--in a pink muslin, white silk stockings, and black patent-leather
pumps, the whole crowned by a pink-satin hair-bow. With the remembrance,
the pretend-game was forgotten utterly: The lines of limp, white
creatures on the roofs flung their tortured shapes about unheeded.

At bed-time the previous evening Potter had telephoned that Madam would
pay a morning visit to the nursery. The thought had kept Gwendolyn awake
for a while, smiling into the dark, kissing her own hands for very
happiness; it had made her heart beat wildly, too. For she reviewed all
the things she intended broaching to her mother--about eating at the
grown-up table, and not having a nurse any more, and going to
day-school.

Contrary to a secret plan of action, she slept late. At breakfast,
excitement took away her appetite. And throughout the study-hour that
followed, her eyes read, and her lips repeated aloud, several pages of
standard literature for juveniles that her busy brain did not
comprehend. Yet now as she waited behind the rose hangings for the
supreme moment, she felt, strangely enough, no impatience. With three to
attend her, privacy was not a common privilege, and, therefore, prized.
She fell to inspecting the row of houses across the way--in search for
other strange but friendly faces.

There were exactly twelve houses opposite. The corner one farthest from
the river she called the gray-haired house. An old lady lived there who
knitted bright worsted; also a fat old gentleman in a gay skull-cap who
showed much attention to a long-leaved rubber-plant that flourished
behind the glass of the street door. Gwendolyn leaned out, chin on palm,
to canvass the quaintly curtained windows--none of which at the moment
framed a venerable head. Next the gray-haired house there had been--up
to a recent date--a vacant lot walled off from the sidewalk by a high,
broad bill-board. Now a pit yawned where formerly was the vacant space.
And instead of the fascinating pictures that decorated the bill-board
(one week a baby, rosy, dimpled and laughing; the next some huge
lettering elaborately combined with a floral design; the next a mammoth
bottle, red and beautiful, and flanked by a single gleaming word:
"Catsup") there towered--above street and pit, and even above the
chimneys of the gray-haired house--the naked girders of a new steel
structure.

The girders were black, b