meeting her, but this, for
some perverse reason, I did not do. I wished I might run away and hide
somewhere till her visit was over. It annoyed me to have to clean up the
play-room on her account, and to help polish the silver, and to comb
out the fringe of the tea napkins. I liked to help in these tasks
ordinarily, but to do it for the purpose of coming up to a visiting--and
probably, a condescending--goddess, somehow made me cross.

Among other hardships, I had to take care of my little sister Julie all
day. I loved Julie. She had soft golden-brown curls fuzzing around on her
head, and mischievous brown eyes--warm, extra-human eyes. There was a
place in the back of her neck, just below the point of her curls, which
it was a privilege to kiss; and though she could not yet talk, she had a
throaty, beautiful little exclamation, which cannot be spelled any more
than a bird note, with which she greeted all the things she liked--a
flower, or a toy, or mother. But loving Julie as she sat in mother's
lap, and having to care for her all of a shining Saturday, were two
quite different things. As the hours wore along I became bored with
looking at the golden curls of my baby sister; I had no inclination to
kiss the "honey-spot" in the back of her neck; and when she fretted from
heat and teething and my perfunctory care, I grew angry.

I knew mother was busy making custards and cakes for Aunt Cordelia, and
I longed to be in watching these pleasing operations. I thought--but
what does it matter what I thought? I was bad! I was so bad that I was
glad I was bad. Perhaps it was nerves. Maybe I really had taken care
of the baby too long. But however that may be, for the first time in my
life I enjoyed the consciousness of having a bad disposition--or perhaps
I ought to say that I felt a fiendish satisfaction in the discovery that
I had one.

Along in the middle of the afternoon three of the girls in the
neighbourhood came over to play. They had their dolls, and they wanted
to "keep house" in the "new part" of our home. We were living in a roomy
and comfortable "addition," which had, oddly enough, been built before
the building to which it was finally to serve as an annex. That is to
say, it had been the addition before there was anything to add it to. By
this time, however, the new house was getting a trifle old, as it waited
for the completion of its rather disproportionate splendours; splendours
which represented the ambitions rat