looked at Sara in these days, and no one seemed to see her as she
hurried along the crowded pavements. She had begun to grow very fast,
and, as she was dressed only in such clothes as the plainer remnants of
her wardrobe would supply, she knew she looked very queer, indeed. All
her valuable garments had been disposed of, and such as had been left
for her use she was expected to wear so long as she could put them on
at all. Sometimes, when she passed a shop window with a mirror in it,
she almost laughed outright on catching a glimpse of herself, and
sometimes her face went red and she bit her lip and turned away.

In the evening, when she passed houses whose windows were lighted up,
she used to look into the warm rooms and amuse herself by imagining
things about the people she saw sitting before the fires or about the
tables. It always interested her to catch glimpses of rooms before the
shutters were closed. There were several families in the square in
which Miss Minchin lived, with which she had become quite familiar in a
way of her own. The one she liked best she called the Large Family.
She called it the Large Family not because the members of it were
big--for, indeed, most of them were little--but because there were so
many of them. There were eight children in the Large Family, and a
stout, rosy mother, and a stout, rosy father, and a stout, rosy
grandmother, and any number of servants. The eight children were always
either being taken out to walk or to ride in perambulators by
comfortable nurses, or they were going to drive with their mamma, or
they were flying to the door in the evening to meet their papa and kiss
him and dance around him and drag off his overcoat and look in the
pockets for packages, or they were crowding about the nursery windows
and looking out and pushing each other and laughing--in fact, they were
always doing something enjoyable and suited to the tastes of a large
family. Sara was quite fond of them, and had given them names out of
books--quite romantic names. She called them the Montmorencys when she
did not call them the Large Family. The fat, fair baby with the lace
cap was Ethelberta Beauchamp Montmorency; the next baby was Violet
Cholmondeley Montmorency; the little boy who could just stagger and who
had such round legs was Sydney Cecil Vivian Montmorency; and then came
Lilian Evangeline Maud Marion, Rosalind Gladys, Guy Clarence, Veronica
Eustacia, and Claude Harold Hector.