Mirror Image
"Mamma, are you going out again tonight?"
At the glass, Mrs. Sparkler was busy surveying herself from all angles, and only vaguely noticed the outline of the child who had come to stand in the doorway behind her.
"'Again,' indeed," she retorted. "With only one invitation this week worth any attention. It really is enough to make one wish one was dead!"
The younger Fanny—very like her mother in feature, as well as in name—was used enough to such explosions, to ignore this one. She said nothing, only continued to regard her mother attentively.
"Yes, if you must know," Mrs. Sparkler added after a while, prompted by the silence and stillness of the image sharing the glass with her. "There is to be a dinner, and dancing, and we may be rather late."
The child's face lit faintly, as if with hope tempered by caution. She drew a deep breath.
"Then may I go and stay at Aunt Amy's tonight?" she asked.
Without looking round, the elder Fanny gave an impatient toss of her head—still a very pretty head, though its prettiness now owed something more to art than to nature.
"How you children do go on about that shabby little place," she complained. "What you see in it, I can't think."
Little Fanny glanced around the splendid room, in which there were a great many shiny and expensive things, for which very little money had been paid as yet, though many creditors made increasingly impatient appeals. There appeared to be little in it that satisfied her searching gaze.
Then she thought of Aunt Amy's gentle smile and warm embrace, and of sitting on Uncle Arthur's knee as he read aloud from her favorite storybooks. She thought of merry games with her cousins by firelight in the cheerful little parlour, and secrets whispered under the blankets when everyone else in the house was asleep.
She knew better, however, than to try to explain the appeal of these things to her mother.
"But may I go?" she persisted, simply.
"Certainly not," her mother said shortly. "We haven't time to take you. Surely you can find enough to do here for one night."
Again, the younger Fanny said nothing. But her chin came up, and as she turned to go, there was a mutinous sparkle in her eyes that boded little good for her serenely unconscious parent. One kind or sympathetic word from that parent, even at this moment, might have thawed the ice that was beginning to form around her young heart. But the mother had nothing more to say to the daughter, and the moment passed, and the image in the mirror was gone.
