ive you a present?"

"What do you mean?"

"Would you like him to give you a li'l' girl like me?"

"Not at all; and you stop asking questions, Mrs. Chatter."

Her mother was suddenly aware of Jenny's cross-examinations, which she
had been answering mechanically with thoughts far away with a florid man
in a jingling hansom cab. Jenny was conscious of her dreaming and knew
in her sly baby heart that her mother was in a weak mood. But it was too
good to last long enough for Jenny to find out all she wanted to know.

"Why don't you send father away and have that gentleman as a lodger?"

"I told you once; don't keep on."

"But why don't you?"

"Because I don't want to."

In bed that night Jenny lay awake and tried to understand the
conversation in the parlor. At present her intelligence could only grasp
effect. Analysis had not yet entered her mind.

She saw, in pictures on the ceiling, her mother and the rich strange
gentleman. She saw her father watching. She saw them all three as
primitive folks see tragedies, dimly aware of great events, but
powerless to extract any logical sequence. Lying awake, she planned
pleasant surprises, planned to bring back Mr. Timpany and banish her
father. It was like the dreams of Christmas time, when one lay awake and
thought of presents. She remembered how pleased her mother had professed
herself by the gift of a thimble achieved on Jenny's side by a great
parsimony in sweets. The gentleman had offered a cosy house. At once she
visualized it with lights in every window and the delicious smell that
is wafted up from the gratings of bakers' shops. But what was a Ralli
cart? Something to do with riding? And Jenny was to come, too, and share
in all this. He had said so distinctly. If he gave mother a house, why
should he not give her a doll's house such as Edie boasted of in the
house of a friend, such as Edie had promised to show her some day. She
began to feel a budding resentment against her mother for saying "No" to
all these delights, a resentment comparable with her emotions not so
long ago when her mother refused to let her go for a ride on an omnibus
with Mr. Vergoe.

Good things came along very seldom, and when they did come, grown-up
people always spoiled them. Life, as Jenny lay awake, seemed made up of
small repressions. Life was a series of hopes held out and baffled
desires, of unjust disappointments and aspirations unreasonably
neglected. She lay there, a mite in flow