re the high cheval glass in her mother's dressing-room. Her clothes
lay scattered far and wide, falling where she had flung them; not a shred
of any kind of covering was left to her. She must have been very small,
for she could remember looking up and seeing high above her head the two
brass knobs by which the glass was fastened to its frame. Suddenly, out
of the upper portion of the glass, there looked a scared red face. It
hovered there a moment, and over it in swift succession there passed the
expressions, first of petrified amazement, secondly of shocked
indignation, and thirdly of righteous wrath. And then it swooped down
upon her, and the image in the glass became a confusion of small naked
arms and legs mingled with green cotton gloves and purple bonnet strings.

"You young imp of Satan!" demanded Mrs. Munday--her feelings of outraged
virtue exaggerating perhaps her real sentiments. "What are you doing?"

"Go away. I'se looking at myself," had explained Joan, struggling
furiously to regain the glass.

"But where are your clothes?" was Mrs. Munday's wonder.

"I'se tooked them off," explained Joan. A piece of information that
really, all things considered, seemed unnecessary.

"But can't you see yourself, you wicked child, without stripping yourself
as naked as you were born?"

"No," maintained Joan stoutly. "I hate clothes." As a matter of fact
she didn't, even in those early days. On the contrary, one of her
favourite amusements was "dressing up." This sudden overmastering desire
to arrive at the truth about herself had been a new conceit.

"I wanted to see myself. Clothes ain't me," was all she would or could
vouchsafe; and Mrs. Munday had shook her head, and had freely confessed
that there were things beyond her and that Joan was one of them; and had
succeeded, partly by force, partly by persuasion, in restoring to Joan
once more the semblance of a Christian child.

It was Mrs. Munday, poor soul, who all unconsciously had planted the
seeds of disbelief in Joan's mind. Mrs. Munday's God, from Joan's point
of view, was a most objectionable personage. He talked a lot--or rather
Mrs. Munday talked for Him--about His love for little children. But it
seemed He only loved them when they were good. Joan was under no
delusions about herself. If those were His terms, well, then, so far as
she could see, He wasn't going to be of much use to her. Besides, if He
hated naughty children, why did He m