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found whomever you were looking for. Mrs. Parnatt, whom the children called Old Lady Parrot, and who was Helen’s grandmother, spent most of the day in a back room with the door locked; when she came out to the bathroom or to the kitchen to make herself coffee they saw an old woman with a tiny head and shoulders and huge from the waist down; an aged Pekinese following her in and out of her room. The dog’s name was Lotus, and when the girls were in Helen’s room next to her grandmother’s, they could hear the old lady crying over the dog, or sometimes stamping around the room and screaming because the dog had fouled the rug.
    â€œThat dog snaps,” Helen was fond of saying to her friends. “Some day she’s going to hit him with a chair or something and he’s going to bite her hand off.”
    When Harriet Merriam came to the house—the other girls thought this was funny and tormented her with it—she would open the door a crack, peering down the long dark hall inside to see if the grandmother’s door were open. If the door were open that meant that Lotus was abroad, and Harriet would wait outside. “I don’t want him to snap at
me
,” she said reasonably.
    â€œIf he snapped at
me
I’d kick him in the head and kill him,” Hallie said wisely. “That’s how you kill dogs anyway, kick them in the head.”
    â€œYou just kick my grandmother’s dog,” Helen said. She laughed. “My
grandmother
would bite you.”
    In Helen’s room at the back of the house were old fashion magazines and pictures of movie stars and collections of lace and ribbons the girls used to dress up in; Helen’s mother worked in the city, and she bought Helen neat young girl’s clothes which Helen decorated with bows or lace collars or five-and-ten jewelry and wore to school. Sometimes the girls at Helen’s house would go into the dark front room where Helen’s mother sat alone in the evenings, and play records on the phonograph and dance together. Once or twice they brought George Martin in to dance with them, although he was clumsy and had to be bribed with penny candy before he would stand up patiently for a minute or two and walk around the floor holding one of the girls.
    â€œWhen I go live with my
father
,” Helen said frequently, “I’ve got to know how to dance and how to dress pretty, because my father is going to take me out a lot and we’re going to travel and everything.”
    â€œWhere is your father?” someone, probably Harriet, would ask, and perhaps Virginia Donald would add respectfully, “You’re terribly lucky.”
    â€œMy father goes everywhere,” Helen said. “Maybe Paris, or New York. Paris is where they have men who kiss your hands.” She giggled, and it made the other girls giggle too. With a lace shawl over her head, Helen stood up and curtseyed, holding out her hand. “Why, Mr. Paris,” she said in a high voice, “you mean you want to kiss
my
hand?”
    Hallie stood in back of her, shouting, “Why, Mr. Johnny Desmond, you mean you want to kiss
my
hand?”
    And Helen said seriously, “Boy, I’m not going to stay here much longer. I’m going to find my father pretty soon now.”
    The Williams family was moving soon; Mrs. Williams had mentioned to Miss Fielding, who was the only person outdoors in the very early morning when Mrs. Williams left to catch her bus to the city, that it was too hard to try to get back and forth every day, and she wanted to put the girls into a city school. Miss Fielding told Mrs. Desmond, who said timidly that perhaps it was just as well. Little Mildred Williams, Mrs. Desmond said, was entirely too sweet and kind to be away from her mother all the time, and Mrs. Desmond added, with a stronger note to her voice, that perhaps the grandmother (out of respect for Miss Fielding’s age Mrs. Desmond did not say