her childish imagination craved, and that was much.  The imagination of a child is often like a voracious maw, seizing upon all that comes within reach, and producing spiritual indigestions and assimilations almost endless in their effects upon the growth.  This window before which Ellen stood was that of a market:  a great expanse of plate-glass framing a crude study in the clearest color tones.  It takes a child or an artist to see a picture without the intrusion of its second dimension of sordid use and the gross reflection of humanity.

Ellen looked at the great shelf laid upon with flesh and vegetables and fruits with the careless precision of a kaleidoscope, and did not for one instant connect anything thereon with the ends of physical appetite, though she had not had her supper.  What had a meal of beefsteak and potatoes and squash served on the little white-laid table at home to do with those great golden globes which made one end of the window like the remove from a mine, those satin-smooth spheres, those cuts as of red and white marble?  She had eaten apples, but these were as the apples of the gods, lying in a heap of opulence, with a precious light-spot like a ruby on every outward side.  The turnips affected her imagination like ivory carvings:  she did not recognize them for turnips at all.  She never afterwards believed them to be turnips; and as for cabbages, they were green inflorescences of majestic bloom.  There is one position from which all common things can be seen with reflections of preciousness, and Ellen had insensibly taken it.  The window and the shop behind were illuminated with the yellow glare of gas, but the glass was filmed here and there with frost, which tempered it as with a veil.  In the background rosy-faced men in white frocks were moving to and fro, customers were passing in and out, but they were all glorified to the child.  She did not see them as butchers, and as men and women selling and buying dinners.

However, all at once everything was spoiled, for her fairy castle of illusion or a higher reality was demolished, and that not by any blow of practicality, but by pity and sentiment.  Ellen was a woman-child, and suddenly she struck the rock upon which women so often wreck or effect harbor, whichever it may be.  All at once she looked up from the dazzling mosaic of the window and saw the dead partridges and grouse hanging in their rumpled brown mottle of plumage, and the dead rabbits, long and stark, with their fur pointed with frost, hanging in a piteous headlong company, and all her delight and wonder vanished, and she came down to the hard actualities of things.  “Oh, the poor birds!” she cried out in her heart.  “Oh, the poor birds, and the poor bunnies!”

Just at that moment, when the sudden rush of compassion and indignation had swollen her heart to the size of a woman’s, and given it the aches of one, when her eyes were so dilated with the sight of helpless injury and death that they reflected the mystery of it and lost the outlook of childhood, when her pretty baby mouth was curved like an inverted bow of love with the impulse of tears, Cynthia Lennox came up the street and stopped short when she reached her.