"I think I ought to tell you that I've never believed in dolls.
I've always thought they were a waste of time and kept children
from learning to do useful things. I've brought Rebecca Mary up
according to my best light."

"Worst darkness!" thought the minister's wife, hotly.

"She's never had a doll. I never had one. I got along. I could
make butter when I was seven. So perhaps you'd better take the
doll--"

"No, no! Please keep it, Miss Olivia, and if you should ever change
your mind--I mean perhaps sometime--good-bye. It's a beautiful day, isn't it?"

Aunt Olivia took it up into the guest chamber and laid it in an
empty bureau drawer. She closed the drawer hastily. She did not
feel as duty-proof as she had once felt, before things had happened--softening things that had pulled at her heartstrings and weakened her. The quilt on the guest chamber bed was one of the
things; she would not look at it now. And the sheets under the quilt--and the grave of Thomas Jefferson that she could see from
the guest chamber window. Aunt Olivia was terribly beset with the temptation to take the doll out to Rebecca Mary in the garden.

"Are you going to do it?" demanded Duty, confronting her. "Are
you going to give up all your convictions now? Rebecca Mary's in
her twelfth year-pretty late to begin to humor her. I thought
you didn't believe in humoring."

"I unpinned the nightgown," parried Aunt Olivia, on the defensive.
"I never let her make another one."

"But you're weakening now. You want to let her have THIS doll."