By the Light of the Soul | Page 7

little golden fleece of hair farther over her forehead. She
pushed it back, revealing the bold yet delicate outlines of her temples.
She thought how glad she should be when her hair was grown. She had
had an illness two years before, and her mother had judged it best to
have her hair cut short. It was now just long enough to hang over her
ears, curving slightly forward like the old-fashioned earlocks. She had
her hair tied back from her face with a pink ribbon in a bow on top of
her head. She loosened this ribbon, and shook her hair quite loose. She
peeped out of the golden radiance of it at herself, then she shook it back.
She was charming either way. She was undeveloped, but as yet not a
speck of the mildew of earth had touched her. She was flawless,
irreproachable, except for the knowledge of her beauty, through
heredity, in her heart, which was older than she herself.
Suddenly Maria, after a long gaze of rapture at her face in the glass,
gave a great start. She turned and saw her mother standing in the door
looking at her.
Maria, with an involuntary impulse of concealment, seized her brush,
and began brushing her hair. "I was just brushing my hair," she
murmured. She felt as guilty as if she had committed a crime.
Her mother continued to look at her sternly. "There isn't any use in
your trying to deceive me, Maria," said she. "I am ashamed that a child
of mine should be so silly. To stand looking at yourself that way! You
needn't think you are so pretty, because you are not. You don't begin to
be as good-looking as Amy Long."
Maria felt a cold chill strike her. She had herself had doubts as to her
superior beauty when Amy Long was concerned.

"You don't begin to be as good-looking as your aunt Maria was at your
age, and you know yourself how she looks now. Nobody would dream
for a minute of calling her even ordinary-looking," her mother
continued in a pitiless voice.
Maria shuddered. She seemed to see, instead of her own fair little face
in the glass, an elderly one as sallow as her mother's, but without the
traces of beauty which her mother's undoubtedly had. She saw the thin,
futile frizzes which her aunt Maria affected; she saw the receding chin,
indicative at once of degeneracy and obstinacy; she saw the blunt nose
between the lumpy cheeks.
"Your aunt Maria looked very much as you do when she was your
age," her mother went on, with the calm cruelty of an inquisitor.
Maria looked at her, her mouth was quivering. "Did I look like Mrs.
Jasper Cone's baby that died last week when I was a baby?" said she.
"Who said you did?" inquired her mother, unguardedly.
"She did. She came up behind me with Mrs. Elliot when I was waiting
for father to get the peaches, and she said her baby that died looked just
like me; she had always thought so."
"That Cone baby look like you!" repeated Maria's mother. "Well, one's
own always looks different to them, I suppose."
"Then you don't think it did?" said Maria. Tears actually stood in her
beautiful blue eyes.
"No, I don't," replied her mother, abruptly. "Nobody in their sober
senses could think so. I am sorry poor Mrs. Cone lost her baby. I know
how I felt when my first baby died, but as for saying it looked like
you--"
"Then you don't think it did, mother?"
"It was one of the homliest babies I ever laid my eyes on, poor little

thing, if it did die," said Maria's mother, emphatically. She was
completely disarmed by this time. But when she saw Maria glance
again at the glass she laid hold of her moral weapons, the wielding of
which she believed to be for the best spiritual good of her child. "Your
aunt Maria was very much better looking than you at her age," she
repeated, firmly. Then, at the sight of the renewed quiver around the
sensitive little mouth her heart melted. "Get out of your clothes and into
your night-gown, and get to bed, child," said she. "You look well
enough. If you only behave as well as you look, that is all that is
necessary."
Chapter III
Maria fell asleep that night with the full assurance that she had not been
mistaken concerning the beauty of the little face which she had seen in
the looking-glass. All that troubled her was the consideration that her
aunt Maria, whose homely face seemed to glare out of the darkness at
her, might have looked just as she did when she was her age. She hoped,
and then she