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in. Even the Sunday school one isn’t very clean … it was Mrs Bellew’s Ethel’s old pink one and she spilled coffee on it. And she has to work so hard … she’s a regular little slave, Mary says. I like Jody very much, mummy. She’s sweet.”
    “Well” … mother sighed and gave way. Mother always gave way if you were firm enough. Jane had already discovered that. She adored mother but she had unerringly laid her finger on the weak spot in her character. Mother couldn’t “stand up to” people. Jane had heard Mary say that to Frank one time when they didn’t think she heard and she knew it was true.
    “She’ll go with the last one that talks to her,” said Mary. “And that’s always the old lady.”
    “Well, the old lady’s mighty good to her,” said Frank. “She’s a gay little piece.”
    “Gay enough. But is she happy?” said Mary.
    “Happy? Of course, mummy is happy,” Jane had thought indignantly … all the more indignantly because, away back in her mind, there was lurking a queer suspicion that mother, in spite of her dances and dinners and furs and dresses and jewels and friends, wasn’t happy. Jane couldn’t imagine why she had this idea. Perhaps a look in mother’s eyes now and then … like something shut up in a cage.
    Jane could go over and play in the yard of 58 in the spring and summer evenings after Jody had finished washing stacks of dishes. They made their “imaginary” garden, they fed crumbs to the robins and the black and grey squirrels, they sat up in the cherry-tree and watched the evening star together. And talked! Jane, who could never find anything to say to Phyllis, found plenty to say to Jody.
    There was never any question of Jody coming to play in the yard of 60. Once, early in their friendship, Jane had asked Jody to come over. She had found Jody crying under the cherry-tree again and discovered that it was because Miss West had insisted on her putting her old Teddy bear in the garbage pail. It was, Miss West said, utterly worn out. It had been patched until there was no more room for patches and even shoe buttons couldn’t be sewn any more into its worn-out eye-sockets. Besides, she was too old to be playing with Teddy bears.
    “But I’ve nothing else,” sobbed Jody. “If I had a doll, I wouldn’t mind. I’ve always wanted a doll … but now I’ll have to sleep alone away up there … and it’s so lonesome.”
    “Come over to our house and I’ll give you a doll,” said Jane.
    Jane had never cared much for dolls because they were not alive. She had a very nice one which Aunt Sylvia had given her the Christmas she was seven but it was so flawless and well dressed that it never needed to have anything done for it and Jane had never loved it. She would have loved better a Teddy bear that needed a new patch every day.
    She took Jody, wide-eyed and enraptured, through the splendours of 60 Gay and gave her the doll which had reposed undisturbed for a long time in the lower drawer of the huge black wardrobe in Jane’s room. Then she had taken her into mother’s room to show her the things on mother’s table … the silver-backed brushes, the perfume bottles with the cut-glass stoppers that made rainbows, the wonderful rings on the little gold tray. Grandmother found them there.
    She stood in the doorway and looked at them. You could feel the silence spreading through the room like a cold, smothering wave.
    “What does this mean, Victoria … if I am allowed to ask?”
    “This is … Jody,” faltered Jane. “I … I brought her over to give her my doll. She hasn’t any.”
    “Indeed? And you have given her the one your Aunt Sylvia gave you?”
    Jane at once realized that she had done something quite unpardonable. It had never occurred to her that she was not at liberty to give away her own doll.
    “I have not,” said grandmother, “forbidden you to play with this … this JODY in her own lot. What is in the blood is bound to come out sooner or