"No; do think a little, sweetheart. With dear!—dear?"
"Vegetables?" asked Anne-Marie, who had spent many hours in Frau Schmidl's kitchen.
Nancy groaned. "Dear!" she repeated again.
"Darling!" cried Anne-Marie triumphantly, and was lifted up and embraced.
"I wish you were a poet, Anne-Marie!" said her mother, pushing the fair locks from the child's level brow.
"What for?" said Anne-Marie, wriggling.
"Poets never die," said Nancy, thus placing a picture in the fairy-tale book.
"Then I'll be," said Anne-Marie, who knew death from having buried a dead kitten in the Schmidls' yard, and dug it up a day or two after to see what it was like.
But Anne-Marie was not to be a poet. In the little pink and white books that mothers think they create, the Story is written before ever they reach the tender maternal hands. And Anne-Marie was not to be a poet.
But Nancy herself could not forget that Fate had printed the seal of immortality upon her own girlish brow. She thought: "I cannot finish The Book now. The Book must wait until later on, when Anne-Marie does not need me every moment. But now, now I can write a cycle of child-poems on Anne-Marie."