ever have had dreams about him, how she could ever have preferred a boy to a baby like her little sister, even in her dreams.  She ceased haunting the post-office for a letter from that other boy in New England, who had asked her to correspond over the garden fence, and who had either never written at all, or had misdirected his letter.  She wondered how she had thought for a moment of doing such a thing as writing to a boy like that.  She remembered with disgust how overgrown that boy was, and how his stockings were darned at the knees; and how she had seen patches of new cloth on his trousers, and had heard her aunt Maria say that he was so hard on his clothes on account of his passion for bird-nesting, that it was all his mother could do to keep him always decent.  How could she have thought for a moment of a bird-nesting sort of boy?  She was so thankful that the baby was a girl.  Maria, as sometimes happens, had a rather inverted system of growth.  With most, dolls come first, then boys; with her, dolls had not come at all.  Boys came first, then her little baby sister, which was to her in the place of a doll, and the boys got promptly relegated to the background.

Much to Maria’s delight, the French nurse, whom she at once disliked and stood in awe of, only remained until the baby was about two months old, then a little nurse-girl was engaged.  On pleasant days the nurse-girl, whose name was Josephine, wheeled out the baby in her little carriage, which was the daintiest thing of the kind to be found, furnished with a white lace canopy lined with rose-colored silk.  It was on these occasions that Maria showed duplicity.  On Saturdays, when there was no school, she privately and secretly bribed Josephine, who was herself under the spell of the baby, to go home and visit her mother, and let her have the privilege of wheeling it herself.  Maria had a small sum every week for her pocket-money, and a large part of it went to Josephine in the shape of chocolates, of which she was inordinately fond; in fact, Josephine, who came of the poor whites, like Gladys Mann, might have been said to be a chocolate maniac.  Maria used to arrange with Josephine to meet her on a certain corner on Saturdays, and there the transfer was made:  Josephine became the possessor of half a pound of chocolates, and Maria of the baby.  Josephine had sworn almost a solemn oath to never tell.  She at once repaired to her mother’s, sucking chocolates on the way, and Maria blissfully wheeled the baby.  She stood in very little danger of meeting Her on these occasions, because the Edgham Woman’s Club met on Saturday afternoon.  It often happened, however, that Maria met some of the school-girls, and then nothing could have exceeded her pride and triumph.  Some of them had little brothers or sisters, but none of them such a little sister as hers.