“I guess you can stand it if I can!” said the rat-trap.

“O, yes, dear,” said the Lady of Shalott.  “I can stand it if you can.”

“Well, then!” said Sary Jane.  But she sat and winked at the bald window, and the window held its burning tongue.

It grew hot in South Street.  It grew very hot in South Street.  The lean children in the attic opposite fell sick, and sat no longer in the window making faces, in the Lady of Shalott’s glass.

Two more monkeys from the spring-box were carried away one ugly twilight in a cart.  The purple wing that hung over the spring-box lifted to let them pass; and then fell, as if it had brushed them away.

“It has such a soft color!” said the Lady of Shalott, smiling.

“So has nightshade!” said Sary Jane.

One day a beautiful thing happened.  One can scarcely understand how a beautiful thing could happen at the east end of South Street.  The Lady of Shalott herself did not entirely understand.

“It is all the glass,” she said.

She was lying very still when she said it.  She had folded her hands, which were hot, to keep them quiet too.  She had closed her eyes, which ached, to close away the glare of the noon.  At once she opened them, and said:—­

“It is the glass.”

Sary Jane stood in the glass.  Now Sary Jane, she well knew, was not in the room that noon.  She had gone out to see what she could find for dinner.  She had five cents to spend on dinner.  Yet Sary Jane stood in the glass.  And in the glass, ah! what a beautiful thing!

“Flowers!” cried the Lady of Shalott aloud.  But she had never seen flowers.  But neither had she seen waves.  So she said, “They come as the waves come.”  And knew them, and lay smiling.  Ah! what a beautiful, beautiful thing!

Sary Jane’s hair was fiery and tumbled (in the glass), as if she had walked fast and far.  Sary Jane (in the glass) was winking, as she had winked at the blazing window; as if she said to what she held in her arms, Don’t tell!  And in her arms (in the glass), where the waves were—­oh! beautiful, beautiful!  The Lady of Shalott lay whispering:  “Beautiful, beautiful!” She did not know what else to do.  She dared not stir.  Sary Jane’s lean arms (in the glass) were full of silver bells; they hung out of a soft green shadow, like a church tower; they nodded to and fro; when they shook, they shook out sweetness.

“Will they ring?” asked the Lady of Shalott of the little glass.

I doubt, in my own mind, if you or I, being in South Street, and seeing a lily of the valley (in a 10 X 6 inch looking-glass) for the very first time, would have asked so sensible a question.

“Try ’em and see,” said the looking-glass.  Was it the looking-glass?  Or the rat-trap?  Or was it—­

O, the beautiful thing!  That the glass should have nothing to do with it, after all!  That Sary Jane, in flesh and blood, and tumbled hair, and trembling, lean arms, should stand and shake an armful of church towers and silver bells down into the Lady of Shalott’s little puzzled face and burning hands!