were green inflorescences of majestic bloom. There is one position
from which all common things can be seen with reflections of
preciousness, and Ellen had insensibly taken it. The window and the
shop behind were illuminated with the yellow glare of gas, but the
glass was filmed here and there with frost, which tempered it as
with a veil. In the background rosy-faced men in white frocks were
moving to and fro, customers were passing in and out, but they were
all glorified to the child. She did not see them as butchers, and as
men and women selling and buying dinners.

However, all at once everything was spoiled, for her fairy castle of
illusion or a higher reality was demolished, and that not by any
blow of practicality, but by pity and sentiment. Ellen was a
woman-child, and suddenly she struck the rock upon which women so
often wreck or effect harbor, whichever it may be. All at once she
looked up from the dazzling mosaic of the window and saw the dead
partridges and grouse hanging in their rumpled brown mottle of
plumage, and the dead rabbits, long and stark, with their fur
pointed with frost, hanging in a piteous headlong company, and all
her delight and wonder vanished, and she came down to the hard
actualities of things. "Oh, the poor birds!" she cried out in her
heart. "Oh, the poor birds, and the poor bunnies!"

Just at that moment, when the sudden rush of compassion and
indignation had swollen her heart to the size of a woman's, and
given it the aches of one, when her eyes were so dilated with the
sight of helpless injury and death that they reflected the mystery
of it and lost the outlook of childhood, when her pretty baby mouth
was curved like an inverted bow of love with the impulse of tears,
Cynthia Lennox came up the street and stopped short when she reached