"Aunt Alice is so sensible," Pauline explained a few weeks later, "she talks to me a great deal; she's only a few years older than I am. She has shown me all her things for the baby. Mamma didn't think she ought ... you know how mothers are. They're in the bureau drawer in the best room. I'll show them to you some time; Alice won't mind."
Alice didn't mind, it appeared, so it must have been shyness that led us to select the afternoon when the married women were away, and though I cannot forgive the conditions which led us so surreptitiously to touch the fringe of the great experience, I own still to some tenderness for the two girls with their heads together that bright hot afternoon, over the bureau drawer in Mrs. Allingham's best room. Pauline showed me a little sacque which she had crocheted.
"Mother thought I was too young, but Alice said I might."
"You must have liked to, awfully," I envied.
"That's one of the nice things about having children, I should think"—Pauline fingered a hemstitched slip—"you can make things for them."
"Which would you rather have, girls or boys?" I hazarded.
"Oh, girls; you can always dress them so prettily."
"But boys ... they can do so many things when they grow up." I felt rather strongly on that point.
"Alice says"—Pauline folded the little frock—"that she's so glad to have it she doesn't care which it is." Something, perhaps an echo of my mother's experience, pricked in me.
"They aren't always as glad as that."