let their own teachers and mothers be as gentle as possible. The humorous convention of childhood insists on this travesty of its parents and instructors.
Georgiana, however, was endurable. The trouble really began with Lilietta, who had brown eyes instead of blue, and who had the further disadvantage of coming dressed in one brief garment, so that Georgiana had to share her clothes with her new sister. She did not mind it, being a broad-minded doll, but it rent Sara's heart. It rent her heart in both ways. She hated to take clothes away from Georgiana in the first place, and she hated Lilietta to wear given clothes in the second. Again her mother beheld in Sara things she had never learned at home. It had not been Sara's lot ever to give her clothes to other children or to receive clothes. Whence came this prejudice with its accompanying anguish?
Sara wanted clothes for Lilietta with an intensity that had a wolfish quality. So fierce a light shone in her eyes that Alice bestirred herself with needle and thread, remembering a sampler with three holes cut in it—one for the head, two for the arms—that hung in a stairway in her mother's house. This sampler, according to tradition, had been cut up to clothe a doll which belonged to Alice's grandmother, and it must have been with a similar fierce light in her eye that this ancestor of Sara's had pierced these holes in the piece of cloth. Anything might be snipped up by Sara, Alice realized, unless Lilietta were clothed.
