“I visited her at her house on Long Island. Oh, Mother, it’s wonderful! It has a beautiful lawn and garden all around it, and on the first floor out of all the rooms there are long windows, like doors, which are always kept open, so you can walk out onto the grass at any time, just as easily as walking out from underneath a tree. Upstairs in the house there are the loveliest bedrooms and little tiled bathrooms hidden away like jewels on the inside of a watch. And all the bedroom doors stand open all day. Nobody ever thinks of locking the bedroom door. And in the pantry off the dining-room there’s a big tin box with rows of thin cookies on each shelf. You can take one whenever you’re hungry. Sometimes you can go into the kitchen and make candy! Oh, Mother,” Laurel broke off, “would it cost too awfully much for us to have a house all of our own somewhere—not a great big expensive one, like Mrs. Morrison’s, but a little tiny one with a front door that’s just ours, and a dining-room that’s just ours, and a warm sleepy-looking kitchen that’s just ours, where I could make candy sometimes (Mrs. Morrison and I made fudge one rainy day in the kitchen), and a guest-room so I could ask girls to come and stay all night with me sometimes? Mrs. Morrison asked a girl my age, whose mother she knew, to come and stay with me one night. And she came, and when she went she asked me to come and stay all night with her!” (No girl had ever asked Laurel to stay all night with her before.) “But I couldn’t because I had to go back to New York the next day. I hated to go back to New York to Miss Simpson. Mother, next to you I think Mrs. Morrison is the loveliest lady I ever saw.” Laurel’s voice actually trembled.

Stella removed the orange-stick from her mouth and laid it down on the table beside the buffer.

“There,” she said, “how do those look?” And she held up Laurel’s fingers for her to see. She spoke harshly. She had to or the child might discover the tremble in her voice too.

Laurel gave the fingers a hasty glance. “They’re all right,” she remarked. Then dropping her hands on the bath-towel, and gazing out of the window, she added, and a glow stole into her eyes—into her voice also, “Mrs. Morrison has the most beautiful hands—long and white and slim like the rest of her. I wish I could have hands like hers!”

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