"Who is your mother, darling ?" she asked.
"And what is your name ?" But Ellen was silent, except for that one cry, "I want my mother!" The persistency of the child, in spite of her youth and her distress, was almost invulnerable.

She came of a stiff-necked family on one side at least, and sometimes stiff-neckedness is more pronounced in a child than in an adult, in whom it may be tempered by experience and policy.

"I want my mother! I want my mother!" Ellen repeated in her gentle wail as plaintively inconsequent as the note of a bird, and would say no more.
Then Cynthia displayed the parrot, but a parrot was too fine and fierce a bird for Ellen.

She would have preferred him as a subject for her imagination, which could not be harmed by his beak and claws, and she liked Cynthia's story about him better than the gorgeous actuality of the bird himself.

She shrank back from that shrieking splendor, clinging with strong talons to his cage wires, against which he pressed cruelly his red breast and beat his gold-green wings, and through which he thrust his hooked beak, and glared with his yellow eyes.
Ellen fairly sobbed at last when the parrot thrust out a wicked and deceiving claw towards her, and said something in his unearthly shriek which seemed to have a distinct reference to her, and fired at her a volley of harsh "How do's" and "Good-mornings," and "Good-nights," and "Polly want a cracker's," then finished with a wild shriek of laughter, her note of human grief making a curious chord with the bird's of inhuman mirth.