“You dear little thing,” she said, “I’d love it—I’d love it. But I truly haven’t any place for you to live—or any time to give you. Come now—I’m going to get you some candy and take you back where you belong—in an automobile. Won’t that be fun?”
But when she turned for the candy, Littlegirl slipped out the door and ran and ran as fast as she could. (She had thanked the lady, first thing, for the thick, frozen, foamy chocolate, so that part was all right.) And Littlegirl went round a corner and lost herself in a crowd—in which it is far easier to lose yourself than in the woods. And there she was again, worse off than before, because she had felt how it would feel to feel that she had a mother.
The Earth—who would have shaken its head if it could without disarranging everything on it—said things instead to its Shadow—who was by now on the other side of the world from the City.
“Shadow, dear,” said the Earth, “what do you think of that?”
“The very Uttermost Spaces are ashamed for her,” said the Shadow.
But of course the Blue Linen Lady had no idea that the Earth and its Shadow and the Uttermost Spaces had been watching to see what she did.
Littlegirl ran on, many a weary block, and though she met mother-looking women she dared speak to none of them for fear they would offer to take her back in an automobile, with some candy, to the people with whom she lived-without-belonging. And of late, these people had said things in her presence about the many mouths to feed, and she had heard, and had understood, and it had made her heart beat Mother, as it had when she wakened that day.
At last, when she was most particularly tired, she came to the park where it was large and cool and woodsy and wonderful. But in the park the un-motherness of things was worse than ever. To be sure, there were no mothers there, only nurse-maids. But the nurse-maids and the children and the covers-to-baby-carriages were all so ruffly or lacy or embroidery or starchy and so white that mother was written all over them. Nobody else could have cared to have them like that. How wonderful it would be, Littlegirl thought, to be paid attention to as if you were a really person and not just hanging on the edges. Even the squirrels were coaxed and beckoned. She sat down on the edge of a bench on which an old gentleman was feeding peanuts to a squirrel perched on his knee, and she thought it would be next best to having a Christmas tree to be a squirrel and have somebody taking pains like that to keep her near by.
“Where’s your nurse, my dear?” the old gentleman asked her finally, and she ran away so that he should not guess that she was her own little girl and nobody else’s.
Wherever she saw a policeman, she lingered beside a group of children so that he would think that she belonged to them. And once, for a long way, she trotted behind two nurses and five children, pretending that she belonged. Once a thin, stooped youth in spectacles called her and gave her an orange. He was sitting alone on a bench with his chin in his chest, and he looked ill and unhappy. Littlegirl wondered if this was because he didn’t have any mother either, and she longed to ask him; but she was afraid he would not want to own to not having any, in a world where nearly everyone seemed to have one. So she played through the long hours of the morning. So, having lunched on the orange, she played through the long hours of the afternoon. And then Dusk began to come—and Dusk meant that Earth’s Shadow had run round again, and was coming on the side where the City lay.