The painted doll that the child fancied! the paint washed off and the golden hair all turned to drab? Could one be sure of “getting used to it,” of “liking it better?” And the poor bewildered doll itself! How could one expect to make of it a statue: “The Woman of the People.” One could only bruise it. “When shall I know that you are old and decrepit?” he asked.!

“I am going,” he said, “where there is just the possibility of an accident: one never knows. I wanted to be sure that all was well with you.” Joan thought. “It’s curious,” she said, “one so seldom hears of anybody being born on Christmas Day.”

It seemed, in spite of its open door, a very silent little house behind its strip of garden. Joan had the feeling that it was listening. But even that did not help her. It seemed in some mysterious way to be no longer her room, but the room of someone she had known and half forgotten: who would never come back. It gave her the same feeling she had experienced on returning to the house in London: that the place was haunted. The high cheval glass from her mother’s dressing-room had been brought there for her use. The picture of an absurdly small child—the child to whom this room had once belonged—standing before it naked, rose before her eyes. She had wanted to see herself. She had thought that only her clothes stood in the way. If we could but see ourselves, as in some magic mirror? All the garments usage and education has dressed us up in laid aside. What was she underneath her artificial niceties, her prim moralities, her laboriously acquired restraints, her unconscious pretences and hypocrisies? She changed her clothes for a loose robe, and putting out the light drew back the curtains. The moon peeped in over the top of the tall pines, but it only stared at her, indifferent. It seemed to be looking for somebody else. “As friends of Mary Stopperton,” he said, “we meet on neutral ground. But in all matters of moment I expect we are as far asunder as the poles. I stand for the People.”