servers and all vicissitudes. When this baby smiled it smiled, and
when it cried it cried. It was honest from the crown of its fuzzy
head to the soles of its little pink worsted socks.

At the first reception which Ida gave after the baby came, and when
it was on exhibition in a hand-embroidered robe, it screamed every
minute. Maria was secretly glad, and proud of it. It meant much to
her that _her_ baby should not smile at all the company, whether it
was smiling in its heart or not, the way She did. Maria had no room
in her heart for any other love, except that for her father and the
baby. She looked at Wollaston Lee, and wondered how she could ever
have had dreams about him, how she could ever have preferred a boy to
a baby like her little sister, even in her dreams. She ceased
haunting the post-office for a letter from that other boy in New
England, who had asked her to correspond over the garden fence, and
who had either never written at all, or had misdirected his letter.
She wondered how she had thought for a moment of doing such a thing
as writing to a boy like that. She remembered with disgust how
overgrown that boy was, and how his stockings were darned at the
knees; and how she had seen patches of new cloth on his trousers, and
had heard her aunt Maria say that he was so hard on his clothes on
account of his passion for bird-nesting, that it was all his mother
could do to keep him always decent. How could she have thought for a
moment of a bird-nesting sort of boy? She was so thankful that the
baby was a girl. Maria, as sometimes happens, had a rather inverted
system of growth. With most, dolls come first, then boys; with her,
dolls had not come at all. Boys came first, then her little baby
sister, which was to her in the place of a doll, and the boys got
promptly relegated to the background.

Much to Maria's delight, the French nurse, whom she at once disliked
and stood in awe of, only remained until the baby was about two
months old, then a little nurse-girl was engaged. On pleasant days
the nurse-girl, whose name was Josephine, wheeled out the baby in her
little carriage, which was the daintiest thing of the kind to be
found, furnished with a white lace canopy lined with rose-colored
silk. It was on these occasions that Maria showed duplicity. On
Saturdays, when there was no school, she privately and secretly
bribed Josephine, who was herself under the spell of the baby, to go
home and visit her mother, a