“One of them you would be very pleased to have admire you,” Sally answered back, now having taken up the cudgels in good earnest.
“Will you pleathe to tell me who you mean,” returned Florence in a haughty tone.
“Oh, you needn’t look so scornful. It was Clyde Fawcett. I heard him say to your own brother, Frank, that he thought Ellen North was going to be a stunner, and Frank said: ‘I think she is now. She can have me.’ So there, miss.”
Florence’s eyes no longer looked dreamy, but flashed anger. “I think you’re perfectly horrid,” she exclaimed. “Come on, March.”
Sally, nothing abashed, walked across the school yard to where Ellen and Caro were sitting. She had made Ellen’s cause hers, and meant to so assert it. Hereafter Florence’s clique would no more name her as one of them.
It was quite true that Caro was assiduous in her attentions, for scarce a day passed that she did not offer up something upon the altar of her friendship,—a particularly big red apple, a package of fudge, a little basket of persimmons, one of chinquapins, or of nuts. Ellen accepted all these gratefully, and though she rather wearied of Caro’s caresses and words of endearment, often they comforted the lonely girl, who no longer received such marks of affection, Miss Rindy not being given to demonstration. However, she gave a sturdy sort of love to her young cousin, while her keen sense of humor saved situations which might have become difficult, or even tragic.
“We’re none of us paragons of perfection; you are not any more than the rest of the world,” she said one day when Ellen was repeating some of Caro’s remarks. “Compliments and appreciation are all very well in their way; they are the ice-cream and cake of life, but if you are going to depend upon them for a steady diet, you will have spiritual indigestion as sure as you’re born. We need to be bucked up by good honest criticism; that’s the roast beef.”
“And what is the bread and butter?” Ellen asked laughing.
“Work, like bread, is the staff of life; and butter, well, butter is the consciousness of having done our work as well as we could; the more you slight it the thinner it spreads.”
“I suppose that’s true,” returned Ellen thoughtfully. “But don’t you like compliments, Cousin Rindy?”