Maudie left as soon as the Brunsons had begun their dessert and I stayed on to serve the coffee and to wash the dishes. It was strange, rather than embarrassing, to serve Betty and to find her eyes always elsewhere than on me, and after dinner to see her hidden behind a magazine in a corner of the sofa while I cleared her parents’ coffee cups away and brought in the ice-water. But later, when I was washing the dishes, she came into the kitchen and sat on a high green stool, talking with me, telling me the plots of movies she had seen, reporting on her Saturdays in Boston which were filled with visits to the dentist (“My daddy wouldn’t hurt me for the world,” she said, “so I have to go to Dr. Harrison on the Bay State Road.”), with music and dancing lessons, fittings at the dressmaker, excursions to Schrafft’s for hot chocolate with tons of whipped cream, and visits to her Uncle Harry’s house on Beacon Hill. Or she told me about the decorations in her bedroom, as if I had never seen them, had not, on Saturday when she was away and it was my day to clean the upstairs, fondled and pawed the porcelain shepherdesses that supported the lamps on her dressing table, their crooks bursting incongruously into parasols. I had gazed, awed, at the glassy photographs lining the walls, of Bebe Daniels, Clara Bow, Ramon Navarro, Janet Gaynor, Richard Barthelmess, inscribed with grandiloquent scrawls to “Betty.” I had looked through the windows of the doll-house where a whole family was engaged in ossified enterprises: a baby with a rosy backside lay face down in a cradle; a fat old grandmother stood in the bathroom, intently studying the tub as if she wanted to make sure how things looked before she left the house—she wore a hat and a fur-trimmed coat and carried a folded umbrella in one hand and a knitting bag in the other. A mother stood squarely in the center of the kitchen, a china broom lying flat at her feet; and on the roof, the father of the establishment was always emerging from the chimney where he was presumably making repairs; his legs, up to the waist, were invisible from the top but could be seen dangling through the ceiling of the dining-room, his heels nearly touching the rare roast beef (so life-like there were smudges of blood on the platter) and the golden banana which dwarfed the meat, these two dishes being the sole fare of the family from the beginning of my acquaintance with them until the end of it. Two children, a boy and a girl, stood facing each other at opposite ends of the parlor, doing nothing. I was charmed by the tiny kitchen stove with a door that really opened, the delicate round gilt table in the vestibule which showed, through its glass top, a bright blue butterfly with folded wings resting on a shasta daisy, and with the perfect little Christmas tree that stood in the sun parlor, everlastingly green, its bangles and loops of tinsel and tiny Santas proclaiming that to this happy, paralyzed family, Christmas was every day.