By the Light of the Soul | Page 7

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 hoped that the hope was not wicked, that she might die young rather than live to look like her aunt Maria. She pictured with a sort of pleasurable horror, what a lovely little waxen-image she would look now, laid away in a nest of white flowers. She had only just begun to doze, when she awoke with a great start. Her father had opened her door, and stood calling her.
"Maria," he said, in an agitated voice.
Maria sat up in bed.