LOVEY MARY

CHAPTER I

A CACTUS-PLANT


For life, with all it yields of joy and woe,
And hope and fear,...
Is just our chance o' the prize of learning love,--
How love might be, hath been indeed, and is.
BROWNING'S "A Death in the Desert."

Everything about Lovey Mary was a contradiction, from her hands and
feet, which seemed to have been meant for a big girl, to her high
ideals and aspirations, that ought to have belonged to an amiable one.
The only ingredient which might have reconciled all the conflicting
elements in her chaotic little bosom was one which no one had ever
taken the trouble to supply.

When Miss Bell, the matron of the home, came to receive Lovey Mary's
confession of repentance, she found her at an up-stairs window making
hideous faces and kicking the furniture. The depth of her repentance
could always be gaged by the violence of her conduct. Miss Bell looked
at her as she would have looked at one of the hieroglyphs on the
Obelisk. She had been trying to decipher her for thirteen years.

Miss Bell was stout and prim, a combination which was surely never
intended by nature. Her gray dress and tight linen collar and cuffs
gave the uncomfortable impression of being sewed on, while her rigid