But to Jeanne's mind, the girl she saw in her own mirror had a nice face, even if it was rather brown. She liked the other child's big, dark eyes; now serious, now sparkling under very neat, slender eyebrows, with some new, entertaining thought. The mirror-girl's mouth was just a bit large, perhaps, with red lips, full of queer little wiggly curves that came and went, according to her mood. Her nose, rather a small affair, at best, did it turn up or didn't it? One couldn't be quite sure. Lizzie's turned up, Ikey Goldberg's turned down; but this nose seemed to do both. For that reason, it seemed a most interesting nose, even if there were no freckles on it.
When lips are narrow and straight, when noses are likewise absolutely straight, as Pearl's and Clara's were, they may be perfect or even beautiful, but they are not interesting. A wiggly mouth, as Jeanne said, keeps one guessing. So does an uncertain nose.
Then there was the mirror-child's chin. Not a big chin like the one in the picture of Bridget's first husband, the prize-fighter; nor a chinless chin like Ethel's.
"Quite a good deal of a chin, I should say," was Jeanne's verdict.
Then the rest of the mirror-child. A little smaller, perhaps, than many girls of the same age; but very nicely made. Arms the right size and length, hands not too big, shoulders straight and not too high like Bridget's, nor too sloping like Maggie's. A slight waist that didn't need to be pinched in like Aunt Agatha's. Legs that looked like girls' legs, not like piano legs—as Hannah Schmidt's did, for instance, when Hannah wore white stockings. The feet were small. The hair grew prettily about the bright, sociable face.
"You're just about the best young friend I have," declared Jeanne, kissing the mirror-child. "I'm glad you live in my closet—I'd be awfully lonesome if you didn't."
Jeanne, however, was not a vain little girl, nor a conceited one. She simply didn't think of the mirror-child as herself. The girl in the mirror was merely another girl of her own age, and she loved her quite unselfishly. Perhaps Jeanne's most personal thought came when she washed her face.
"I'm so glad I don't have beginning-whiskers like the milkman," said she, "or a wart on my nose like Bridget's. It's much pleasanter, I'm sure, to wash a smooth face like this."