Pencil poised in mid-air; Nancy leaned down from her Nest where she had been working. Aunt Milly was nodding in her chair, her finger and thumb between the pages of "Sarah Crewe," from which she had been reading until she had succumbed to the drowsy sounds of the summer air. Nonie had been tiptoeing back and forth across the grass making funny, little, inarticulate sounds in her throat.
"I'm playing party," Nonie stopped under the apple tree and lifted a thoughtful face to Nancy. "When I grow up I shall have ten children and have parties all the time. There'll be harps and violins and drums and lots and lots to eat. And I shall wear velvet, with a long train, and carry a big fan." She sighed. "Do you always have to be beautiful to do beautiful things?"
"Just doing beautiful things makes you seem beautiful," explained Nancy.
Nonie was not satisfied. "B'lindy makes beautiful cakes and pies but she isn't beautiful. And Jonathan puts seeds in the ground that grow into pretty flowers but—he's ugly! Could I do beautiful things and—look like this?" She spread out her shabby skirts.
Behind the troubled gaze Nancy caught the gleam of a vision.
"You can—you can! Nonie, no one can ever take your dreams away from you!"
"Not even Liz," echoed Nonie, bitterly.
A few days before a tragedy had touched Nonie's life. From out of nowhere there had wandered into her affections a hungry-eyed, maltese cat with two small babies. Nonie had mothered them passionately, tenderly. She had hidden scraps of food from her own meagre portions to feed them; she had fitted a box with old rags and had concealed it beneath the loose plankings of the shed. Then, mother cat, satisfied that her babies were in good hands, had disappeared.
"Even kittens can't have mothers," Nonie had thought, perplexed over the ways of the world. "Never mind, darlings, Nonie will love you," and she had kissed each small puss as a pledge of her devotion.
But a week later she found both kittens lying stiff and cold behind the shed. At her passionate outburst, Liz had told her that "she wa'nt a goin' to have any cats under foot!"