She had tweedy, uncomplaining skirts that could get through the scratchiest holes in a hedge without tearing like Nurse’s, and blouses with blue fluttery ribbons, and petersham waistbelts that would go twice round Laura if she pulled hard, and a little straw hat like a schoolboy’s. And she hardly ever wore gloves. But on Sundays she had a floppy thing with a rose in it and a great trailing feather, and a beautiful brown frock, with red silk down the front, that Laura called the robin dress. She could sing like a robin too, high and sweet, and she knew all the songs that had ever been sung, and had read all the books that had ever been written, and could tell you all about them all. She had a dear smiling face, and her hair was so long that she could sit on it, just like Rapunzel, and nobody could brush it as Laura did, because her mother, twisting a little in her chair and making funny faces, often said so. Her mother was always saying and doing funny things: she could make Laura laugh by just looking at her. Yet she was always properly serious over a dead bird or a bumped forehead, and had a most soothing way of making an armchair of lap and arm and shoulder for Laura to curl up in till she felt better. With Nurse she was simply magnificent. She had a way of pretending that she wasn’t afraid of her that made Laura gasp. She had poured a glass of rhubarb and magnesia into the slop-pail once, before Nurse’s own eyes: and had said, of course Laura might have the door of the night-nursery left open if she wanted it—why not?—though she explained those shadows that dance upon the wall privately to Laura afterwards, and so satisfactorily that Laura was ready to withdraw her objection. Yes, she was an understanding person. When they drove out in the low pony-trap through the narrow lanes that were hedged with damson trees, she never wondered that Laura should want the long yellow straws that dangled from the branches to show where a waggon-load of corn had passed. She would stand up and rake them down with her whip without more ado. She would stop half a dozen times in half an hour to let Laura jump out and pick herb-robert, or convolvulus, or ropes of briony, and give advice as to the weaving of a wreath, and wear it round her hat when it was done at whatever angle Laura preferred, with an air that proved to Nurse and other mothers that she wore it to please herself quite as much as Laura. And Laura, subconsciously, was aware that the mother she worshipped, worshipped with equal frankness a small daughter whom no one else found particularly attractive. And it was possibly that knowledge that allowed the mother’s personality so to interknit with the daughter’s, that its uprooting came near to tearing out the child’s heart also.