"It doesn't matter--what we spoke about, you know, unless perfectly convenient." "Oh, but it will be convenient, perfectly. Good-night. Sleep well." "You too. Pleasant dreams. Good-night." "Good-night." The rustling drew nearer, and Mrs. Darling stood in the doorway, looking with a sort of absent-minded astonishment at the assemblage in her room. The violets were quite dead on her white bosom; her hair was beginning to come loose, and stood out in golden wisps about her flushed face. She looked very sweet and soft and shiny-eyed and pleasant altogether. "What is it?" she asked; and as Jetty was evoluting and clamoring about her feet she picked him up and kissed him like a mother. "Has anything happened? What is everybody doing up here? Whose little girl is this sitting up so late? They used to tell me I should never grow, my dear, if I sat up so late--" "This is what it is, ma'am," began Mrs. Bonnet; and she told her arrangement of the story, uttering her words as a mowing-machine cuts weeds. Mrs. Darling abstractedly took the rocking-chair; as she listened, the pleasant, happy look forsook her face. "Oh, cut it short!" she interrupted, sharply. "What you have to tell is that the child there has broken one of the dolls, isn't it?" There was an assenting mutter from Mrs. Bonnet. "And you've kept her here, when she ought to have been in bed these hours, to bear the first beauty of my displeasure--" Mrs. Darling had said so much in a hard voice, with an appearance of cold anger; here her voice suddenly died, and she burst out crying like a vexed, injured child. "I _declare_ it is too bad!" she sobbed, quite reckless of making a spectacle of herself, while all looked on and listened in consternation--"I declare it is too bad! It's no use! It doesn't matter _what_ I do--it is always the same! It is _always_ taken for granted I will conduct myself like a beast. Who can wonder, after that, if I do? Here I find them, pale as sheets, the five of them, shaking in their boots because a forlorn little child has broken a miserable doll. And _what_ is it supposed I shall do about it? Didn't I dress the hundred of them for children, and little poor children too? And I must have known they would get broken, of course. _Why_ did I dress them? _What_ did I spend months dressing them for? Solely for _show_, they think--not for any charity, any kindness, any love of children, or anything in the _world_ but to make an effect on an occasion, I suppose--to make myself a merit with the parson, perhaps!" Here her crying seemed to become less of anger and nervousness, and more of sorrow; one would have thought her heart-broken. "Oh, it is too bad! One would imagine I never said a decent thing, or did a kind act, to any one. And Heaven knows it is not for lack of trying to change. But no one sees the difference! I am treated like a vixen and a terror. All the people about me hate and fear and deceive me! A proof of it