On the street she looked very little and she felt—oh, much littler than in the house with furniture. For the street seemed to be merely a world of Skirts—skirts everywhere and also the bottoms of men’s coats with impersonal Legs below. And these said nothing. Away up above were Voices, talking very fast, and to one another, and entirely leaving her out. She was out of the conversations and out of account, and it felt far more lonely than it did with just furniture. Now and then another child would pass who would look at her as if she really were there; but everyone was hanging on its mother’s hand or her Skirt, or else, if the child were alone, a Voice from ahead or behind was saying: “Hurry, dear. Mother won’t wait. Come and see what’s in this window.” Littlegirl thought how wonderful that would be, to have somebody ahead looking back for her, and she waited on purpose, by a hydrant, and pretended that she was going to hear somebody saying: “Do come on, dear. Mother’ll be late for her fitting.” But nobody said anything. Only an automobile stood close by the hydrant and in it was a little yellow-haired girl, and just at that moment a lady came from a shop and got in the automobile and handed the little girl a white tissue-paper parcel and said: “Sit farther over—there’s a dear. Now, that’s for you, but don’t open it till we get home.” What was in the parcel, Littlegirl wondered, and stood looking after the automobile until it was lost. One little boy passed her, holding tightly to his mother’s hand, and she stooping over him and he crying. Littlegirl tried to think what could be bad enough to cry about when you had hold of your mother’s hand and she was bending over you. A stone in your shoe? Or a pin in your neck? Or because you’d lost your locket? But would any of those things matter enough to cry when your mother had hold of your hand? She looked up at the place beside her where her own mother would be walking and tried to see where her face would be.
And as she looked up, she saw the tops of the high buildings across the street, and below them the windows hung thick as pictures on a wall, and thicker. The shop doors were open like doors to wonderful, mysterious palaces where you went in with your mother and she picked out your dresses and said: “Wouldn’t you like this one, dear? Mother used to have one like this when she was a little girl.” And Littlegirl saw, too, one of the side streets, and how it was all lined with homes, whose doors were shut, like closed lips with nothing to say to anybody save those who lived there—the children who were promised Christmas trees—and got them, too. And between shops and homes was the world of Skirts and Voices, mothers whose little girls were at home, daddys who would run up the front steps at night and cry: “Come here, Puss. Did you grow any since morning?” Or, “Where’s my son?” (Littlegirl knew how it went—she had heard them.) Shops and homes and crowds—a City! A City for everybody but her.
When the Earth—who all this time was listening—heard her think that, it made to flow up into her little heart the longing to belong to somebody. And Littlegirl ran straight up to a lady in blue linen, who was passing.
“Are you somebody’s muvver?” she asked.
The lady looked down in the little face and stood still.
“No,” she said soberly.
Littlegirl slipped her hand in her white glove.
“I aren’t anybody’s little girl,” she said. “Let’s trade each other.”
And the Earth, who was listening, made to flow in the lady’s heart an old longing.
“Let’s go in here, at any rate,” said the Lady, “and talk it over.”