Tibbie took the doll loosely, without breath of thanks; but while Mrs. Darling reviewed the dolls, her hand went out involuntarily towards the broken one. Mrs. Darling saw it. "Of course," she said—"of course, you would want that poor dollie to nurse back to health. Now, dear, isn't there one more you would like?"
At this Tibbie's confusion seemed likely to overwhelm and swamp her. "I'll choose one for you," said Mrs. Darling, "and you shall call her Cynthia, after me. How would you like that? Suppose we say this one, with the forget-me-nots? She looks a little like me, doesn't she, with her hair parted in the middle? Her frock is made of a piece of one of my own, and that blue is my favorite color. There, Tibbie, now you have two whole dollies and part of another. You must run right home to bed. A Merry Christmas to you, dear child. I am very happy to have made your acquaintance."
The exuberant Sally talked like a clock gone mad all the way home through the clear wintry night; and since she felt inclined to conversation, it was well she could keep one up alone, for Tibbie, who trotted beside her, holding fast her dolls, did not utter a single word.
THE PASSING OF SPRING
In the crowded, unbeautiful part of the city were two streets forming as if the two long legs of the A we knew as children, the A with feet wide apart, that stood for Ape. A third street went from one to the other, as the little bar does across the A, but crooked, as a child's hand would draw it. This street was narrow, gloomy, and relatively quiet. The tide of traffic kept to the larger streets; the small street knew, beyond the occupants of its own houses and visitors to these, few but hurried foot-travellers who used it as a short cut, and people of inferior pretensions coming there to trade. The ground-story of almost every house was a shop; a person might have spent a life without real necessity for leaving the street. Here boots were made and mended; in the next door, clothes were sold (the dim show-windows were full of decent dresses, very good still for what you paid; you could be fitted even with a ball-dress, all beads and satin bows), yonder you could get money on deposit of your watch, or your flute, or your ear-drops; farther you could have yourself shaved. There was a window full of tarts and loaves; another window in which a roast fowl set its gold note, as some would say, between the pink note of half a ham and the coral note of a lobster.
Across a certain one of the windows in that street for a long time had hung from a line, as from the belt of a savage, tails of hair—black, brown, blond. Below these, two featureless wax faces presented their sallow blankness to the passer, one wreathed with yellow curls, the other capped with brown waves of a regular pattern. Ordered around the twin turned-ebony stands were hairpins, sticks of cosmetic wrapped in silver paper, slabs of chalk laid on pink cotton, china pots with pictures of flowers or beauties and pleasing inscriptions in French, fuzzy white balls of down, combs, gilt-brass ornaments, kid-capped phials containing amber and ruby liquids. On the inside of the heavy shutter, caught back against the street-wall by day, was pasted a large print. This told you in what a prodigious way Madame Finibald's Gold Elixir would make your hair grow, and showed you the picture of a lady who doubtless had used it—her hair was extraordinary, it nearly reached to her feet.
Perhaps it had been found that the neighborhood was become hardened to the sight of the luxuriant pictured hair; perhaps some who had provided themselves with the small copy of it, to be obtained inside on a bottle full of brown stuff, had grown inclined to treat of it lightly: "Ah, Madame Finibald!" perhaps one irritated customer had said to the old proprietress, coming to have made clear to her why after three bottles of Gold Elixir her locks were still not thick, still not glossy and splendid as the announcement promised they should be, "it's easy to cork up herb tea. It's easy to make hair long in a picture, and it's easy to make it thick. I don't believe there ever was any such person as that young woman on the label!" One morning saw a change in Madame Finibald's window. All the accustomed things were crowded to the sides to make room for a chair; on this sat a girl with brown-gold hair that reached in very truth to the floor.
On every morning and every afternoon, through a long winter, first one end and then the other of the little street was crossed by a youth who kept to the larger thoroughfares with the stream. He carried books; he went rapidly, granting small attention to the things he passed. It is not from that to be supposed that he was profoundly thinking. His face, agreeable in feature and color, was rather wanting in expression; no more interesting than it was interested. He passed at precisely the same hour every morning, and the time of his passing in the afternoon varied but little. This, from October unto April. But when April set its gold stamp on the weather, had there been any wise person observing this well—constructed blond machine, applauding its regularity, holding it up perhaps as an example to other young frequenters of schools and lecture-rooms—that wise person would have been troubled, he would have had misgivings, he would have been at last full of grief.