Cynthia turned white and struggled with herself for a moment, then she spoke.  That which she was doing of the nature of a crime was in reality more foreign to her nature than virtue, and her instinct was to return to her narrow and straight way in spite of its cramping of love and natural longings.  “Who is your mother, darling?” she asked.  “And what is your name?”

But Ellen was silent, except for that one cry, “I want my mother!” The persistency of the child, in spite of her youth and her distress, was almost invulnerable.  She came of a stiff-necked family on one side at least, and sometimes stiff-neckedness is more pronounced in a child than in an adult, in whom it may be tempered by experience and policy.  “I want my mother!  I want my mother!” Ellen repeated in her gentle wail as plaintively inconsequent as the note of a bird, and would say no more.

Then Cynthia displayed the parrot, but a parrot was too fine and fierce a bird for Ellen.  She would have preferred him as a subject for her imagination, which could not be harmed by his beak and claws, and she liked Cynthia’s story about him better than the gorgeous actuality of the bird himself.  She shrank back from that shrieking splendor, clinging with strong talons to his cage wires, against which he pressed cruelly his red breast and beat his gold-green wings, and through which he thrust his hooked beak, and glared with his yellow eyes.

Ellen fairly sobbed at last when the parrot thrust out a wicked and deceiving claw towards her, and said something in his unearthly shriek which seemed to have a distinct reference to her, and fired at her a volley of harsh “How do’s” and “Good-mornings,” and “Good-nights,” and “Polly want a cracker’s,” then finished with a wild shriek of laughter, her note of human grief making a curious chord with the bird’s of inhuman mirth.  “I want my mother!” she panted out, and wept, and would not be comforted.  Then Cynthia took her away from the parrot and produced the doll.  Then truly did the sentiment of emulative motherhood in her childish breast console her for the time for her need of her own mother.  Such a doll as that she had never seen, not even in the store-windows at Christmas-time.  Still, she had very fine dolls for a little girl whose relatives were not wealthy, but this doll was like a princess, and nearly as large as Ellen.

Ellen held out her arms for this ravishing creature in a French gown, looked into its countenance of unflinching infantile grace and amiability and innocence, and her fickle heart betrayed her, and she laughed with delight, and the tension of anxiety relaxed in her face.

“Where is her mother?” she asked of Cynthia, having a very firm belief in the little girl-motherhood of dolls.  She could not imagine a doll without her little mother, and even in the cases of the store-dolls, she wondered how their mothers could let them be sold, and mothered by other little girls, however poor they might be.  But she never doubted that her own dolls were her very own children even if they had been bought in a store.  So now she asked Cynthia with an indescribably pitying innocence, “Where is her mother?”