"Yes, an' he don't care so much fer it, either. He sez he could hope they'd die or summer'd come.  (We're going to have a pond in the backyard—to run into the cellar!)  Yuh oughta see that room after he's bathed in that there tin tub. All that's missin' is Noah and Shem—we got the animiles." 

 There was the click of crutches in the dining room. The door opened. A small boy appeared. 

 "Come in, dearie," said Mrs. Fry. Her tone was softened. 

 "What's his name?" asked the visitor. 

 "He don't know," answered Mrs. Fry. "He was in the hospital one time, real sick, and lately he don't remember so good.  'Father McGowan calls him 'Sebastiano.'  Want a cooky, dearie?"  The boy nodded, and smiled. 

 Cecilia had had her friend Marjory to lunch. It had gone rather well. She recalled it as she stood looking out of a heavily glassed window into a frosted street. She, herself, had set the table. The napkins had not been set up in tumblers. The fibroid tumor vase was quite absent. There had been valley lilies in a flat bowl for the centrepiece.... She had disposed of the blue glass butter dish by dropping it. Cecilia felt strangely sad as she did it. The blue glass butter dish had once seemed so very lovely....  "Are they giving me anything to take your place?" she questioned, as it shattered on the floor. Then she called Norah, and listened to her laments as she gathered up the pieces. She had the feeling of untruth added to her little sadness. 

 As yet nothing had taken the place of blue glass butter dishes for small Cecilia. She still preferred rhinestone hair-pins, and French-heeled shoes to their plainer sisters. Beauty had been taken away and none substituted, at least none that she enjoyed. The only thing she really cared for was the dragging of her newly acquired French in her talk. She did this often with the proud feeling that it was what her mother had wished. 

 Jeremiah had said, on meeting Marjory, "Pleased to meet yuh, mam," and Cecilia had broken in with, "I love papa so much, Marjory, you must too."  She had hardly known why she had made this defiant and sudden declaration. Johnny had been much impressed with Cecilia's guest. So much so that his misery was acute when Jeremiah related the incident of the brick throwing. 

 "I sez to him, 'Yuh can lay yer own bricks an' here's one to begin with!'" Jeremiah had said with his customary chuckle, that chuckle 

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