No wonder that the grief and the many changes and now the sober, quiet life with her grandmother in a new place, had made Elsa a sad-eyed, white-faced child. The late summer, after their coming to Berkeley, had been particularly lonely, for there had been nobody to play with. Since October, however, when the Whites had come back from their summer home, Elsa had been happier. Betty as near neighbour, had become Elsa’s special friend, and now she and Alice had also made friends.
When Elsa was ready for bed, in her long white nightgown, she turned off the electric light, put up the window-shades, and looked out toward the Warren house. “I wonder which is Miss Ruth’s room,” she whispered to herself. “Wish I dared to ask her, because if it’s on this side, I could look over sometimes, and feel as if I had company.”
With a little sigh, Elsa knelt down by her white bed and mumbled her prayer. Then, jumping up from her knees, she listened at the door. Not a sound from Cummings, her grandmother’s maid, who had the room next to Elsa’s, and who usually stayed down in the servants’ dining-room until nine o’clock. Everything was quiet. So Elsa went quickly over to the white bureau and pulling open the lower drawer, took from under a pile of playthings a rather small china doll in a faded pink dress, the red of whose cheeks had been almost entirely kissed off. With this doll hugged close in her arms, Elsa crept into bed.
On the white-cushioned couch between the windows sat a dignified row of dolls, seven in all, and all in good clothes. But better than any of these, Elsa loved her little old china doll which her own dear nurse had given her at parting and which Elsa had named for her nurse, Bettina. For some reason which Elsa did not try to explain to herself, she kept Bettina from the sight of her grandmother and especially from Cummings, the middle-aged woman who attended to Mrs. Danforth’s wardrobe and in what time there was left, made dresses for Elsa. Every morning when Elsa woke, the first thing she did, after pressing many loving kisses upon Bettina’s worn face, was to put her away under the pile of playthings in the lower drawer of the bureau.
Thinking about the Club made Elsa feel very wide awake. She began picturing to herself Betty White’s nursery-room with the bright scarlet geraniums, the strawberry-birds, and the pretty chintz cushions; and she hugged her doll the closer to take away the feeling of loneliness in her own dreary white room.
“Now, listen, Bettina, and try to learn our verses; and perhaps we can go to sleep,” said Elsa, beginning to whisper softly the cradle-song her father had taught her, not long before he died. Repeating these three verses every night meant more to Elsa than the prayer which she hurried through on her knees. And Bettina listened attentively, as dolls listen, while a voice said close to her ears:
“Dear Heart, Sweet Heart,
Time that little children
Creep into their mothers’ arms, to wait Sleep’s silent call;
Sweet Heart, Dear Heart,