at you'd call a polished
speaker--and I scraped on. Time and time again we were near starving.
My! that little garret room, and that big church--Panna Marya they
called it--where I'd go and sit with the baby when the services were on
to see if I could keep warm in the crowd! And the big fire in '50, when
I carried the baby out in a field with lots of other people and slept
out. It lasted for ten days that fire.

"It seems like a dream sometimes, all that time," Mrs. Talcott mused,
and the distant sorrow of her voice was like the blowing of a winter
wind. "It seems like a dream to think I got through with the child
alive, and that my sweet, pretty little Dolores went under. There's some
things that don't bear thinking about. Well, I kept that baby warm and I
kept it fat, and it got to be the prettiest, proudest thing you ever set
eyes on. She might have been a queen from the very beginning. And as for
Pavelek, she just ruled him from the time she began to have any sense.
It was mighty queer to see that man, who had behaved so bad to her
mother, cringing before that child. He doted on her, and she didn't care
a button for him. It used to make me feel almost sorry for Pavelek,
sometimes. She'd look at him, when he tried to please her and amuse her,
like he was a performing dog. It kept Pavelek in order, I can tell you,
and made things easier for me. She'd just say she wanted things and if
she didn't get them straight off she'd go into a black rage, and he'd be
scared out of his life and go and work and get 'em for her. And then she
began to show she was a prodigy. Pavelek taught her the violin first and
then the piano and when he realized she was a genius he most went off
his head with pride. Why that man--the selfishest, laziest creature by
nature--worked himself to skin and bone so that she should have the best
lessons and everything she needed. We both held our noses to the
grindstone just as tight as ever we could, and Mercedes was brought up
pretty well, I think, considering.

"She gave that first concert in Warsaw--we'd moved to Warsaw--and then
Pavelek seemed to go to pieces. He just drank himself to death. Well,
after that, rich relations of Mercedes's turned up--cousins of the
Bastidas', who lived in Paris. They hadn't lifted a finger to help
Dolores, or me with the baby after Dolores died; but they remembered
about us now Mercedes was famous and made us come to live with them in
Paris and said they had first cla