for bed—which was quite a rite. I tried very hard never to interfere with any attempts to discipline her, but she soon found out that she could turn to me for comfort when anything went wrong.

By the time she was five months old she had learned the sound of my footsteps and would try to attract her mother’s attention and point to the door, and would try to look crestfallen if I didn’t come into their apartment. As time passed her parents began to comment on her being like me in various ways, and they could not understand why it should be so, nor could I—as I had never heard of them till a few months before Beverly’s arrival.

From the time she could sit up she seemed to know that anything that had printing on it was something to be read, and she would take a newspaper and magazine in her hands and make sounds as though she were reading from them. She learned to turn pages by herself when she was about five months old and had a fine discrimination as to what was worthwhile and what might be torn; for instance she would tear a newspaper or magazine like True Story, but she was very careful with National Geographic Magazine. When she came into my apartment this discrimination was even more marked as my reading material is an entirely different type from what she found in her home.

When she was between eight and nine months old, her mother was giving a shower for a friend one night, and had made great preparations. I was to take care of Beverly, which merely meant bringing her bed into my apartment as she always went to sleep promptly at seven thirty. But morning of the day of the party Helen became sick—chills, cramps and a violent headache. At noon when I went in she said, “I don’t know how I am ever going to get through it, but it is too late to call it off now.”

Beverly was sitting on the floor playing and she looked up when her mother said that—as though she hadn’t understood it was that bad. Helen said that all morning as she lay on the couch Beverly would crawl over now and then and pat her. But this time she made her way over to her mother and pulled herself up beside her. First she parted her mother’s hands where crossed on her stomach; then she moved along to her head and held her little hand over her mother’s head, while she bowed her own head as though in prayer; next she took her finger and made a mark in the form of cross on her mother’s forehead. She turned to me and smiled and went back to her toys.