Everybodys Lonesome | Page 5

Godmother loved to call it) around the teeming slums; and Godmother knew such touching stories of the Old World conditions from which these myriads of foreign folk had escaped, and of the pathos of their trust in the New World, as kept Mary Alice's eyes bright and wet almost every minute.
One beautiful sunny afternoon they rode up on top of a Fifth Avenue motor 'bus to 90th Street, and Godmother pointed out the houses of many multi-millionaires. She knew things about many of them, too--sweet, human, heart-touching things about their disappointments and unsatisfied yearnings--which made one feel rather sorry for them than envious of their splendours.
Thus the days passed, and Mary Alice was so happy that--learning from Godmother some of her pretty ways--she would go closer to that dear lady, every once in a while, and say: "Pinch me, please--and see if I'm awake; if it's really true." And Godmother always pinched her, gravely, and appeared to be much relieved when Mary Alice cried "Ouch! I am!"
They didn't see anybody, except "from a distance" as they said, for fully a week; they were so busy seeing sights and getting acquainted. Every night when Godmother came to tuck Mary Alice in, they had the dearest talks of all. And every night Mary Alice begged to be told the Secret. But, "Oh, dear no! not yet!" Godmother would always say.
One night, however, she said: "Well, if I'm not almost forgetting to tell you!"
Mary Alice jumped; that sounded like the Secret. But it wasn't--although it was "leading up to it."
"Tell me what?" she cried, excitedly.
"Why, to-day I saw one of your fairies."
"My what?"
"Your fairies that you said were left out of your christening party."
"You did! Where?"
"I'll tell you that presently. But it seems, from what this fairy said, that there are a great number of your fairies with gifts for you, all waiting quite impatiently to be found. She says that it is considered quite 'ordinary' now, to send all of a great gift by one fairy--yes, and not at all safe. For if that one fairy should miss you and you should not find her, you'd be left terribly unprovided for, you see. So the gift is usually divided into many parts, and a different fairy has each part. Now, the gift of beauty, for instance; she is one of the fairies who has that gift for you."
Mary Alice's eyes opened wide. Her belief in this wonderful Godmother was such that she was almost prepared to see Godmother wave a wand and command her to become beautiful--and then, on looking into a mirror, to find that she was so. "What did she say?" she managed at last to gasp.
"She said: 'Has she pretty hair?' And I answered, 'Yes.' 'Then,' the fairy went on, 'the one who had that gift must have got to the christening, somehow. Maybe the mother wished for her--and that is as good as an invitation.'"
"She did!" cried Mary Alice. "She's always said she watched me so anxiously when I was a wee baby, hoping I'd have pretty hair."
"Well, that's evidently how that fairy got to you. But it seems there were two. This one I saw to-day says there are two beauties in 'most everything--but especially in hair--one is in the thing itself and the other is in knowing what to do with it. It seems she is the 'what to do' fairy."
And so she proved to be. For, when she came to luncheon next day, she told Mary Alice how she had always been "a bit daft about hair." "When I played with my dolls," she said, "I always cared much more for combing their hair and doing it up with mother's 'invisible' pins, than for dressing them. And it used to be the supreme reward for goodness when I could take down my mother's beautiful hair and play with it for half an hour. I'm always wanting to play with lovely hair. And when I saw yours at the theatre the other evening, I couldn't rest until I'd asked your godmother if she thought you'd let me play with it."
So after luncheon they went into Mary Alice's room and wouldn't let Godmother go with them. "Not at all!" said the "what to do fairy," "you are the select audience. You go into the drawing-room and 'compose yourself.' When we're ready for you, we'll come out."
Then, behind locked doors, with much delightful nonsense and excitement, she divested Mary Alice's head of sundry awful rats and puffs, combed out the bunches which Mary Alice wore in her really lovely hair, brushed smooth the traces of the curling iron, and then made Mary Alice shut her eyes and "hope to die" if she "peeked once."
When permission to "peek" was given, Mary Alice didn't know herself.
"There!" said the fairy, when