Mary Stewart Cutting

“ And down the road from the big house on the hill into which the new rich people had just moved, came a nurse in a cap and a long white apron, and a long, flying-back dark cloak. She was pushing a white wicker baby carriage. There was an eighteen-month baby sitting up straight inside, with pink bunches of ribbon on either side of her cap, her little hands beating the pink, lacy coverlet, and as she came nearer I looked straight into Antoine's big brown eyes, his eyes with the long, curling black lashes, and the dark, curved eyebrows with the little upward twist to the corners ”

“ To think of your longing for the child would take all her own pleasure and comfort away. So we give Toinette back to you.—Wait! One thing is to be clearly understood: One such trial is enough. We will never take the child back under any circumstances. You are never to make any appeal to us! ”

“ If the head nurse knew I was talkin' to you she'd fire me. The father, maybe he has other notions, but he's that crazy about the mother he'd do anything in life to please her. The child's to go to the finest schools and learn all languages, and travel in kings' countries, and if she's after having what they call a genious she's to use it in any way she fancies, op'ra singin', or play-actin', or marryin' a prince. Every night when himself comes in the first thing he says is:
"'And how is our little Toinette to-day?' She's christened Antoinette after her mother." ”

“ Children are so much wiser than we. Sometimes I was afraid of Louis. It isn't what you do or say, it's your thoughts that you can't guard, that slip away from you, and find their way into the minds of others. It seemed to me that people began to look strangely at me.
One day I met Mr. Carrington in the town, and Rose didn't come to the pines the next day or the next, or the next. The day after that, Miss Lily came in for a China crepe shawl of her mother's. ”

“ They have the grandest doctors for her. We have a trained nurse now that's like a eagle, she spies on you so fierce; everything goes by her word. It would make your heart ache sometimes to see the mother look at the child when she's brought into the house and longing to have it for a while to herself, and to kiss it and fondle it, and not daring to."
"Why not?" said I, turning hot and cold.
"It's not hygienical," said the nurse, going on like a mill stream. "The baby's never allowed to be near other children, for every one of 'em's contagious but her ”

“ You're never allowed to talk to her or play with her, because it interferes with her developin' herself; and out of doors, she has to be winter and summer, day and night; she sleeps in a crib on the porch with curtains that's drawn if it rains or snows, because she's delicate like her mother—that's why I have her out here under the pines. ”

“ I said.
"Five," she repeated, but not as if she really heard me. "You must have your hands full. I have only one, you see." She smiled proudly, yet wistfully, too, and my heart suddenly ached for her. ”

“ I went out for day's work at first, sending the children to school and running back at lunch time to give them a bite, if I went without my own; but after a while I got a little trade at home. I did up curtains and laces and fine dresses. One lady told another about me.
But one day, when my tall, pretty Miss Lily came in from the Settlement to the room where I was smoothing out a lace collar in my fingers, she kept looking at me while she talked, and all of a sudden she got up and took the collar from me and held my hands close in hers.
"You poor thing!" she said. "What is the matter?" ”