The Plummer Kind



The doll's name was Olivicia.

Rebecca Mary had evolved the name from her inner consciousness
and her intense gratitude to Aunt Olivia and the minister's wife.
She had put Aunt Olivia first with instinctive loyalty, though in
the secret little closet of her soul she had longed to call the
beautiful being Felicia, intact and sweet. She did not know the
meaning of Felicia, but she knew that the doll, as it lay in the
loving cradle of her arms, gazing upward with changeless
placidity and graciousness, looked as one should look whose name
was Felicia. Greater compliment than this Rebecca Mary could not
have paid the minister's wife.

"Olivicia," she had placed the being on the sill of the attic
window, stood confronting, addressing it: "Olivicia, it's coming-
-it is very near to! Sit there and listen and smile--oh yes,
smile, SMILE. I don't wonder! I would too, only I'm too glad.
When you're TOO glad you can't smile. I've been waiting for it to
come. Olivicia, seems as if I'd been waiting a thousan' years.
You're so young, you've only lived such little while, of course I
don't expect you understand the deep-downness inside o' me when I
think--"