But of course one can't play "Mother" without possessing a family. The Cottagers solved this problem also. Bettie's home could always be counted on to furnish at least two decidedly genuine babies and Jean could always borrow a perfectly delightful little cousin named Anne Halliday; but Marjory and Mabel, to their sorrow, were absolutely destitute of infantile relatives. Mabel was the chief sufferer. Sedate Marjory, plausible of tongue, convincing in manner, could easily accumulate a most attractive family at very short notice by the simple expedient of borrowing babies from the next block; but nowhere within reasonable reach was there a mother willing to intrust her precious offspring a second time to heedless Mabel. "Now, Mabel," Mrs. Mercer would say, when Mabel pleaded to have young Percival for her very own for just one brief hour, "I'd really like to oblige you, but it's getting late in the season, you are not careful enough about doors and windows and the last time you borrowed Percival you brought him home with a stiff neck that lasted three days." "But I did remember to return him," pleaded Mabel. "Do you sometimes forget?" queried Mrs. Mercer, with interest. "I did twice," confessed always honest Mabel; "but truly I don't see how _I_ can help it when babies sleep and sleep and sleep the way those two did. You see, I made a bed for Gerald Price on the lowest-down closet shelf, and he was so perfectly comfortable that he thought he was asleep for all night." "What about the other time?" "That was Mollie Dixon. But then, I had five children that day and only one bed. Mollie slipped down in the crack at the back--she's awfully thin--and I never missed her until her mother came after her. That was rather a bad time [Mabel sighed at the recollection] for Mrs. Dixon found the Cottage locked up for the night and poor little Mollie crying under the bed." "Mabel! And you want to borrow my precious Percival!" "But it couldn't happen _again_," protested Mabel, earnestly. "Bettie says that I'm just like lightning; I never strike twice in the same place. That's the reason I get into so many different kinds of scrapes. I'll be ever so careful, though, if you'll let me borrow Percival just this one time." Mrs. Mercer, however, refused to part with Percival. Other mothers, approached by pleading Mabel, refused likewise to intrust their babies to her enthusiastic but heedless keeping. They knew her too well. "The thing for you to do," suggested Marjory, ostentatiously washing the perfectly clean faces of the four delightful small persons that she had been able, without any trouble at all, to borrow in Blaker Street, "is to find a mother that really _wants_ to get rid of her children."