Mary was bored. Bored with her mother's airs and graces; bored with her over-coddled, sheltered life; and especially bored with the rose in the border of her handkerchief that she could never seem to get quite right. Beautiful embroidery was an essential skill for a true lady, or so Ms. Delayney, the governess, told her; but even so, Mary couldn't seem to muster a solid interest in the art. Oh, she did well enough at it – in fact, Ms. Delayney seemed to think she was something of a prodigy – but over the last few months Mary's pleasure with being praised had lost its keenness. For some reason the knowledge that she was making her mother happy was no longer quite enough of a reason for Mary to do things that she didn't want to do. Ms. Delayney was excessively fond of the word "phase", and used it liberally whenever Mrs. Poppins worried about her daughter's education, so liberally that Mary herself had almost come to believe that one day she would wake up and suddenly be filled once again with the desire to make her parents proud; but five months had passed without change, and Mary was beginning to realize that she didn't want to change back to her old ways. As a young lady of 11 years old, Mary was becoming aware of the world around her and her place in it, and didn't like what she saw.
The Poppins were extremely wealthy. Now, wealth in and of itself isn't inherently bad; it's what the wealthy do with it that matters. Henry Poppins, not having a very original mind, did nothing with his wealth but hoard it and save it and use it to make more money – and as a result was a rather miserable man, though he didn't know it. His wife, Agatha, was from a family of wealthy hoarders and savers, and, not possessing an enquiring mind like that of her daughter, consequently assumed that hoarding and saving was the only way to go about the business of being wealthy. Of course, had Mrs. Poppins objected to her husband's handling of the family fortune, it wouldn't have made much of a difference – she was, after all, only a woman, and as all good late-19th-century-citizens know, women's brains are not suited to business. Their value lies in their ability to bear children, preferably boys; and for the most part Mrs. Poppins did that with admirable vigor. Her first baby was an obstinate, willful slip of a thing with clear blue eyes and a charming shock of almost-black hair. Mrs. Poppins, not feeling a particular kinship with the little creature, as it was indeed not a boy, named it Mary after a vaguely disliked sister. Mary was the eldest of four children, the role model for two brothers and a sister, and as such was always expected by her parents to act the part of a perfectly behaved child. To their relief, Mary's unpleasant nature had faded significantly by her 3rd birthday, and by age five she was as prim and proper as a five-year-old girl can be expected to be. She emulated her mother almost to a fault, sometimes saying things like "and have you heard about Mrs. Raddle? Such a scandal!" to visitors such the Methodist minister; but, after being admonished, she could always elicit forgiveness by smiling her sweet, prim, pious smile and ducking her glossy black head in apology. Her parents were excessively proud of her, and it must be acknowledged that little Mary was not averse to being the reason for excessive pride.
However, nearly every existence is called into question at least once, and for practically perfect Mary, this first jolt of the real world took place two months after her 9th birthday. She was at the park with Ms. Delayney and her brothers (the afore-mentioned little sister was still too young for outings in the park) when she was approached by a grime-encrusted little boy, not much older than herself, wearing a rag of a shirt and a pair of too-big pants held up with belt of rope. Ms. Delayney was off attending to the boys, who, at ages 5 and 7, needed a good deal of supervision, so Mary was left with nothing but her own wits to help her decide how to handle the situation. She of course knew about poor people – she had seen them from a distance often enough and had been warned about them dozens of times – but she had never actually interacted with one, and consequently was rather unsure of what to expect. Would the boy know how to speak? Would Mary have to resort to gesturing and grunting to be understood? Oh, how vulgar – she wouldn't stoop to it. She was about to turn and run (or rather, walk at a fast but dignified pace) to Ms. Delayney when the boy spoke.
"If you please, Miss – care to see a bit o' magic?"
He had the most curious way of speaking, dropping whole letters off the ends of some of his words and changing others into completely different letters than they had any relation to. Nonetheless, Mary was intrigued. There was a glint of intelligence in the boy's eyes that made her turn reluctantly to face him.
"There's no such thing as magic," Mary answered loftily. "Only illusions or sometimes miracles from the Lord, if you're lucky. Minister Davis told me so."
"Did he? Well, he wouldn't know about my kind of magic – it's special, see."
Mary, being an obedient believer in the importance of loyalty to one's elders, sniffed disdainfully. "Minister Davis knows all about it. He told me about people like you. He says you're only after my easily-influenced mind and my pocket money."
The boy grinned. "No charge, Miss." He was amused by this proper little girl, with her spotless pink muslin and shiny dark curls. As a ten-year-old street rat he was rather more aware of the world than Mary was, and had the experience to find her tidy, buttoned-up appearance more amusing than enviable. He had spent enough hours sitting on the steps of St. Paul's watching people go by to know that the happiest were rarely those with the fanciest shawls.
Mary, on her part, couldn't deny a certain curiosity in the boy standing before her. It had never really occurred to her that she could have been born as anyone but herself; but as she stared at the scrawny, srappy boy in front of her she realized with something of a start that she could easily have been born into the same poverty as he was. In fact, for such a well-to-do child of only nine years she saw this surprising clearly. Mary wasn't ignorant by nature or any design of her own. She looked down on the poor not because she thought they were worthy of disdain, but because she was told to look down on them and had no reason to doubt those who told this to her. By nature she was not the type of child to take all information without question, but her natural inquisitiveness had been disciplined out of her when she was too young to know any better. However, everyone grows up eventually, and it is probably safe to say that everyone has to learn to think for his- or her-self at one time or another. In Mary's case this was an excessively good thing, because it meant that one day she was bound to realize that the opinions and values that had been force-fed to her as child weren't based on fact, but rather on a pre-concieved notion of what fact ought to be. Sooner or later she was bound to become once again the intelligent, independent child of her youth.
It was only a matter of time.