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that only some cold cream had been massaged into the child's burns the night before, Ruthie promptly conducted her daughters to a nearby emergency ward. A Japanese intern used a pair of tweezers to pluck the cinders from Betty's blisters and to peel away much of the burned flesh for fear that it had become infected.
    Reports of the extent of Betty's burns have varied widely through the years (with most chroniclers repeating the most dire version, which has the child's entire face affected), but photographs taken by Ruthie at the time show that the damage was mostly limited to the area beneath the chin, around the sides of the face, and the forehead. In Millbrook, Ruthie shared her bed with Betty, whose hands she tied at night to keep her from clawing at her wounds. She attached a small bell to her daughter's wrist in case she managed to break loose. Ruthie set her alarm clock to ring every two hours through the night so that she could dress her daughter's burns.
    Betty's scrape with disfigurement so terrified Ruthie that initially she vowed not to send the child back to Crestalban after the vacation. But her employer, Miss Bennett, persuaded her that it would be better to downplay the accident lest Betty make too much of it. Although Ruthie finally decided to allow Betty to finish the spring term at Crestalban, the accident and its aftermath remained a major turning point for both of them. As she tenderly greased and bandaged the child's face twelve times a day for weeks on end, as if by an act of contagious magic Ruthie seemed to transfer some of her

    own long-thwarted dreams to her daughter. While the bums slowly healed, Ruthie encouraged Betty to believe that some special fate lay in store for her—that she was waiting for something. As with the always vague but no less ardent aspirations of Ruthie's own youth, precisely what the child was supposed to be waiting for remained unclear.
    Late that summer of 1921, when Ruthie and the girls vacationed with Eugenia on heavily forested Mount Desert Island, off the coast of southern Maine, Betty's stomach swelled up hugely one day, as if she were pregnant.
    Not long after they had arrived on the island, the lanky thirteen-year-old had developed her first big crush. The object of her affections was a handsome brown-eyed soda jerk named Francis Young. While walking her home one evening, Francis surprised Betty with a kiss on the lips. In the days that followed, Betty was torn by guilt that she had allowed herself to be kissed. She remembered that it felt not quite clean to her. As with those other maddening obsessions with dirt and disarray that she could never seem to put out of her thoughts once they had begun, all she could think about now was that the kiss would make a baby grow inside her. Soon,' 'quite like the false pregnancy of an animal," as she later described it, her worst fears seemed to have been realized.
    But also like those other strange obsessions of hers, this one came at a moment of disorder in Betty's life. A difficult adjustment faced both Davis giris directly after the vacation. Instead of resuming the healthful outdoor existence they had known and loved for the past three years at Crestalban, they were to move with Ruthie to a furnished tenement apartment on West 144th Street in New York City. Ruthie had left her position at Miss Bennett's. With the money saved by not sending Betty and Bobby back to Crestalban, Ruthie enrolled for the fall term at the Clarence White School of Photography.
    Founded in 1914 to promote the aesthetic potential of the medium, White's New York academy boasted among its alumni such distinguished American photographers as Margaret Bourke-White, Anton Bruehl, Laura Gilpin, Dorothea Lange, Paul Outerbridge, and Doris Ulmann. (The presence of so many women on the list was no accident; from the first, the American pictorialists had gladly received women photographers into their ranks.) To Ruthie, signing up with Clarence White was the