The baby continued to wail, and a note of despair crept into the wail.  Maria could endure it no longer.  She ran across the hall and flung open the door.  The baby lay crying in a little pink-lined basket.  Maria bent over it, and the baby at once stopped crying.  She opened her mouth in a toothless smile, and she held up little, waving pink hands to Maria.  Maria lifted the baby out of her basket and pressed her softly, with infinite care, as one does something very precious, to her childish bosom, and at once something strange seemed to happen to her.  She became, as it were, illuminated by love.

Chapter XI

Maria had fallen in love with the baby, and her first impulse, as in the case of all true love, was secrecy.  Why she should have been ashamed of her affection, her passion, for it was, in fact, passion, her first, she could not have told.  It was the sublimated infatuation half compounded of dreams, half of instinct, which a little girl usually has for her doll.  But Maria had never had any particular love for a doll.  She had possessed dolls, of course, but she had never been quite able to rise above the obvious sham of them, the cloth and the sawdust and the paint.  She had wondered how some little girls whom she had known had loved to sleep with their dolls; as for her, she would as soon have thought of taking pleasure in dozing off with any little roll of linen clasped in her arms.  It was rather singular, for she had a vivid imagination, but it had balked at a doll.  When, as sometimes happened, she saw a little girl of her own age, wheeling with solemnity a doll in a go-cart, she viewed her with amazement and contempt, and thought privately that she was not altogether bright.  But this baby was different.  It did not have to be laid on its back to make its eyes close, it did not have to be shaken and squeezed to make it vociferous.  It was alive, and Maria, who was unusually alive in her emotional nature, was keenly aware of that effect.  This little, tender, rosy thing was not stuffed with sawdust, it was stuffed with soul and love.  It could smile; the smile was not painted on its face in a doll-factory.  Maria was so thankful that this baby, Ida’s baby, did not have Her smile, unchanging and permanent for all observers and all vicissitudes.  When this baby smiled it smiled, and when it cried it cried.  It was honest from the crown of its fuzzy head to the soles of its little pink worsted socks.

At the first reception which Ida gave after the baby came, and when it was on exhibition in a hand-embroidered robe, it screamed every minute.  Maria was secretly glad, and proud of it.  It meant much to her that her baby should not smile at all the company, whether it was smiling in its heart or not, the way She did.  Maria had no room in her heart for any other love, except that for her father and the baby.  She looked at Wollaston Lee, and wondered how she could