She didn't tell me why she took so long, and I felt very sick while I waited for her. She made me lie out on the back seat and parked the car so she could help me. A policeman came along and told her she couldn't park there, but Mommy told him I was sick and he was very, very nice. He wanted to help, but Mommy thanked him and said I had to be very quiet for a while, and then I'd feel better. We were in front of a church and school at Gibbons Avenue, St. Dominic's, on Harford Road. The children came out laughing and running.

The policeman went on, and, after a while, we did too. I felt better, and Mommy started driving home the way we always came. We went past the restaurant where Mommy and I once had sandwiches, and an old man, very tall, with white hair, had come in with a friend. They sat several tables away, and there wasn't anyone else there, except the man who owned the restaurant, Mr. Dubner.

As we got up to leave, the old man looked up and asked me my name. Then he said, "I've seen many children, but she looks more heavenly than any of them. Sit down a minute!"

Mommy sat down because she saw that the white-haired man was thinking something wonderful. He told us about a radio program he had heard the night before. It was called The Portrait of Jennie. Mommy said she had read the book, by Robert Nathan, and the story was a favorite of hers.

An artist, Eben Adams, met a little girl in the park. He was informed that Jennie's father and mother were "actors and actresses." "They're at the Hammerstein Music Hall. They do juggling on a rope." He remembered then that the Hammerstein Music Hall had been torn down 10 years before, and he was puzzled. But it was never really explained. All of the time he knew her, until she was grown-up, she appeared suddenly and always reappeared after promising to return as she left. They met the last time on September 22^nd as she drowned in a storm off the Nantucket Light Ship. She helped him to find faith and to think about God. It made us think about all the mysteries of life. Mommy saw the movie too.

The little girl in it lived when the Titanic sank with her parents aboard. But she came back later on in the life of the artist and grew up again to girlhood. The man in the story, the artist first saw her as a little girl, skating in an old-fashioned velvet skating costume with white fur around the collar and cuffs. He asked her who she was, and she said, "I come when the wind blows. Where I come from, nobody knows." She never told him where she lived, only when she'd come to visit him. She came to see him, and then she'd leave, just disappear! As she grew up in her little visits, he painted her portrait, as though he were under a spell. The last time he saw her, she told him she loved him, and then he didn't see her again. Jennie had always told him she'd come back when she could. And the last time she wept and said good-bye, she finished the verse: "And where I'm going everything goes. The wind blows, the sea flows and God knows."

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