I got up and led her back to bed. She was crying now with horror at the memory of her loathesome skin and yet with relief that it had only been a dream. Her skin was cool and in spite of her tears she looked rested. I would have liked to go back to bed, for my head was throbbing from insufficient sleep and my eyes were hot, but my mother declared that she could not close her eyes again for fear the dream would go on to its dreadful climax. She asked for a lamp and while I was getting her breakfast, she commenced to work again on the proboscis of her humming-bird. “Talk to me, Sonie. You know, talk a blue streak so I’ll know you’re still there.”

Sleepy and cross, impatient with her fancies, I talked, with an intended irony which missed its mark, of my stolid mistress, Mrs. Brunson, who slept until ten every morning, never had nightmares, was never ill, and did not depend upon her daughter for her amusement. I did not, it was true, have the slightest respect for her. She was growing stouter as the result of over-indulgence in chocolate creams and alcohol and although it never occurred to her to reduce her consumption of either, she had become extremely touchy on the subject of her expanding hips. If someone paid her the compliment, “How well you’re looking, Dorothy,” she interpreted it as meaning “How fat you’re getting,” and she would reply testily, “Same to you.” I had at no time envied Betty her mother, but this morning, as I waited for the tea to brew, I wished my own mother’s silliness were more like hers which did not rouse the household out of sound sleep and did not, even when she was drunk, conceive the notion that birds were flying about her bed. Moreover, Mrs. Brunson’s dreams, which she was fond of telling at the dinner table since her best ones came during her afternoon nap, were of the most pedestrian variety, as banal as her speech.

“And Betty writes to her mother once a week from boarding school,” I was saying, “and every time says, please send me a white bengaline evening dress or please send me twenty-five dollars to have my picture taken. And Mrs. Brunson just says okay. She’s the most unselfish mother I ever knew. Mamma, are you listening?”

“Sure. That Mrs. Brunson must be lazy. Why, I wouldn’t feel I was worth my weight in gold if I didn’t get up till ten o’clock.”

“Do you by any chance mean worth your weight in salt?”

“Toot toot toot toot toot! Somebody got out of the wrong side of bed this morning, it seems to me.”