Mary Burton was eleven. Of late, thoughts which had heretofore not
disturbed her had insistently crept into the limelight of consciousness.
One morning as she stood, dish-towel in hand, over the kitchen table,
her eyes stole ever and anon to the cracked mirror that hung against the
wall, and after each glance she turned defiantly away with something
like sullenness about her lips. Elizabeth Burton, the mother, and Hannah
Burton, the spinster aunt, went about their accustomed tasks with no
thought more worldly than the duties of the moment. It never occurred to
Aunt Hannah to complain of anything that was. If her life spelled
unrelieved drudgery she accepted it as the station to which it had
pleased God to call her, and conceived that complaint would be a form of
blasphemy. Now as she wielded her broom, her angular shoulders ached
with rheumatism, and, in a voice as creaking as her joints, she sang,
"For the Master said there is work to do!" Such was Aunt Hannah's creed,
and it pleased her while she moiled over the work to announce in song
that she acted upon divine command. To Aunt Hannah's mind, this lent an
august dignity to a dust-rag.

When Mary savagely threw down her dish-towel and burst unaccountably
into tears, both women looked up, startled. Mary was normally a sunny
child and one not given to weeping.

"For the name of goodness!" exclaimed the mother in bewilderment. "What
in the world can have struck the child?" It was to Aunt Hannah that she
put the question, but it was Mary who answered, and answered with a
sudden flow of vehemence:

"Why didn't God make me pretty?" demanded the girl in an impassioned
voice. "They call me spindle-legs at school, and yesterday Jimmy