A few days later, she came into her room as I was dusting the bureau and, handing me a parcel wrapped in blue tissue paper, said, “I didn’t know whether the baby was a boy or a girl, so I brought a little thing that would do for either.” She left the room at once, before I had even time to thank her. My hands trembled as I untied the white satin ribbon around the little box. I was sure she had given Ivan a silver spoon. Instead, from a nest of white paper, I lifted out a bright yellow celluloid rattle made in the shape of a gourd. Still pasted to the neck was a sticker giving the name of a Marblehead novelty shop and the price, “15¢.” My disappointment lay heavily on my heart until it was lightened by a remark my mother made when she looked at it. “Now that’s what I call ladylike,” she said, shaking the rattle for her own amusement. “It shows she don’t think we’re poor or anyway she don’t want us to know that she knows we’re poor. If she had given us something useful, I would be mad.” Mrs. Brunson, she went on to say, was not ladylike, because she frequently reminded me of my poverty by giving me Betty’s outgrown dresses and sweaters. Until now I had not perceived the insult at the core of her generosity and had been only grateful. Mrs. Henderson, who was calling on my mother, eyed the rattle and said nothing. “Isn’t that right, Mrs. Henderson?”

“I don’t know but what it is, Mrs. Marburg,” replied our neighbor in a voice of restraint. “As the saying is, it’s not the gift but the spirit in which it is given.”

During this summer of my thirteenth year, I was in the dining-room regularly, and because I often served Miss Pride’s table and carefully attended whatever she said, I learned a great deal about her. I had been in the habit of thinking that she had come to the Hotel Barstow all her life, but I learned that a long time before she had spent every summer in Europe. Travel had left no mark upon her. When she spoke of France or Italy or Germany or England, it was to condemn the train service and the touts who “sprang out of the ground, especially in the Latin countries, selling everything regurgitated by the ocean and everything exported by the Japanese.” She would say, “They hang too many pictures on one wall in the galleries. The Uffizi is a tiresome junk-shop.” And I could see her marching through Europe without surprise, taken in by nothing.