I never go past the little town nowadays without looking longingly at that farm from the car-window and wondering if the spring and the spearmint are still there. At times I have almost decided to get off the train and seek it, but have never dared--it would be a needless pain to find my one little spring gone dry. The name of my mother’s rejected suitor was Fairchild. If she could have overcome a certain inexplicable repugnance and married him, “then I might have been a fair child,” I used to think, with a mental play upon the name; for I knew myself to be a very plain little girl. I suffered over this fact; could see myself objectively--greenish-gray eyes, a long nose, a prominent forehead--I hated the sight of my face in the glass, yet would torture myself with scrutinizing it, searching for some redeeming thing, but ending with, “No, there’s nothing, _nothing_ nice about it.” My facial angle I used to study with a hand-glass, mentally cutting about half an inch from my nose, pinning back my ears, and thinking how nice it would be if the straight uncompromising hair would grow low in ripples on that ugly forehead. But, opposed to anything artificial, I would, not bang and curl my hair as the others girls did. Looking at certain girls that I now know were plainer than I, I wondered pitifully if I looked as well as they, afraid of deceiving myself with such cold comfort. All of which shows how self-engrossed and morbid I was; what capacity for self-torture I developed early. I was constantly reading of beautiful persons. I lamented secretly because my mother was not beautiful. I loved her none the less, but had such a craving for the beautiful, which Fate had cruelly withheld from me and my mother. I have often been ashamed of this feeling; it seems as though a child should so love its mother (and such a mother!) that her face would have to be beautiful to it; but it was not so with me. And it was one of my bitter childish and girlish griefs that Mother would not take more pains always to appear at her best. It seems pathetic, how pleased I used to feel when she would wear particularly becoming gowns, or take special pains with dressing her hair. Unable to overcome this feeling, I have always envied one with a beautiful mother. My mother’s heart and soul are beautiful, but there was always this yearning for beauty of face as well as of character. Once, as a child, when impersonating Summer at a school exhibition, crowned with roses and bedecked with garlands of flowers, elated by it all, I sang so much better at the concert than I had at rehearsals as to surprise every one, myself included. Best of all I overheard someone say that I “really looked pretty”; that she never knew before _that my eyes were black_! How I treasured that statement, though knowing it was only a temporary condition!