She told a story about the parrot, which caused Ellen's eyes to
widen with thoughtful wonder; she promised her treasures and
pleasures which made her mouth twitch into smiles in spite of
herself; but with all her efforts, when after breakfast they went
into another room, Ellen broke out again, "I want my mother!"

Cynthia turned white and struggled with herself for a moment, then
she spoke. That which she was doing of the nature of a crime was in
reality more foreign to her nature than virtue, and her instinct was
to return to her narrow and straight way in spite of its cramping of
love and natural longings. "Who is your mother, darling?" she asked.
"And what is your name?"

But Ellen was silent, except for that one cry, "I want my mother!"
The persistency of the child, in spite of her youth and her
distress, was almost invulnerable. She came of a stiff-necked family
on one side at least, and sometimes stiff-neckedness is more
pronounced in a child than in an adult, in whom it may be tempered
by experience and policy. "I want my mother! I want my mother!"
Ellen repeated in her gentle wail as plaintively inconsequent as the
note of a bird, and would say no more.

Then Cynthia displayed the parrot, but a parrot was too fine and
fierce a bird for Ellen. She would have preferred him as a subject
for her imagination, which could not be harmed by his beak and
claws, and she liked Cynthia's story about him better than the
gorgeous actuality of the bird himself. She shrank back from that
shrieking splendor, clinging with strong talons to his cage wires,
against which he pressed cruelly his red breast and beat his
gold-green wings, and through which he thrust his hooked beak, and
glared with his yellow eyes.

Ellen fairly sobbed at last when the parrot thrust out a wicked and
deceiving claw towards her, and said something in his unearthly
shriek which seemed to have a distinct reference to her, and fired
at her a volley of harsh "How do's" and "Good-mornings," and
"Good-nights," and "Polly want a cracker's," then finished with a
wild shriek of laughter, her note of human grief making a curious
chord with the bird's of inhuman mirth. "I want my mother!" she
panted out, and wept, and would not be comforted. Then Cynthia took
her away from the parrot and produced the doll. Then truly did the
sentiment of emulative motherhood in her childish breast console her
for the time for her need of her own mother. Such a doll as that she