goodness, what a different Mamma! When I thought of the
difference, I was surer than ever that I must be dreaming her as she is
now, and I had half a mind to go and peek into the next room to look,
and risk falling down-stairs bang into realities and Denver.

Would she have smooth, straight dark hair with a few threads of grey,
all streaked back flat to her head to please papa; or would she have
lovely auburn waves done on a frame, with a curl draped over her
forehead? Would her complexion be just as nice, comfortable, motherly
sort of complexion, of no particular colour; or would it be pink and
white like rose-leaves floating in cream? Would she have the kind of
figure to fit the corsets you can pick up at any shop, ready made for
fifty-nine and a half cents, and the dresses Miss Pettingill makes for
ten dollars, with the front breadth shorter than the back? Or would she
go in at the waist like an hour-glass and out like an hour-glass, to fit
three hundred-franc stays in Paris, and dresses that would be tight for
_me_?

Poor Mamma! I'd made lots of fun of her these last few months, if they
were real months, I said to myself; and if more real months of that kind
should come, I'd probably make lots of fun of her again. I am _like_
that; I can't help it. I suppose it's what Papa used to call his
"originality," and Mamma his "cantankerousness," coming out in me. But
lying there in the narrow bed, with the dream-dawn fluttering little
pale wings at the window, I seemed suddenly to understand how hard
everything had been for her.

At some minutes, on some days, you _do_ understand people with a queer
kind of clearness, almost as if you had created them yourself--even
people that you turn up your nose at, and think silly or uninteresting
at other times, when your senses aren't sharpened in that magic sort of
way. My "God-days," are what I call those strange days when I can
sympathize with every one as if I'd known their _whole_ history and all
their troubles and thoughts and struggles, ever since they were born. I
call them that, not to be irreverent, but because I suppose God _always_
feels so; and the little spark of Him that's in every human being--even
in a naughty, pert thing like me--comes out in us more on some days than
on others, though only for a few minutes at a stretch even then.

Well, my spark burned up quite brightly for a little while in the dawn,
as I was thinking of Mamma.

I don't suppose she could ev