“She’s been playing with ants; she won’t play with us.” And the girls around giggled.
“She is an oddity,” Miss Adams had replied, and the girls, catching the name, thereafter applied it to Cassy, so that now she was always Miss Oddity. A girl who preferred to play with ants to romping with her schoolmates was something unusual, so they avoided her, and she, feeling that they had little in common, withdrew more and more. Although she longed for a real playmate, a girl after her own heart, none came her way, and finally she invented one.
It was a great day when her imagination created Miss Morning-Glory. It was the day when her first morning-glory seed popped a tiny green head above the earth, and in her exuberance of joy over the fact, Cassy started to school with a great longing for some girl companion who could understand her love for green growing things and for helpless little creatures. Then came the thought, “I’ll make believe a friend, and I’ll call her Miss Morning-Glory,” and forthwith she started up a conversation with this imaginary comrade, to whom she was talking animatedly when several of the schoolgirls passed her. They stopped, stared, and nudged each other.
“She’s talking to herself,” they whispered. “I believe she’s crazy.” But Cassy’s lessons that day were those of a very intelligent little girl, and the others were puzzled.
After this Cassy was not lonely. What could not this new friend say and do? there were no limits to her possibilities. She was always ready when Cassy wanted her. She never quarreled, never objected to any play that Cassy might suggest, and moreover loved and understood all about animals and growing plants.
On the day of the discovery of this new friend Cassy came home with such a happy face that her mother asked: “What has happened, daughter? You look greatly pleased.”
Cassy went over to the window-sill and peered into the box of brown earth where several new blades of green were springing.
“They are coming! they are coming!” she cried.
Her mother smiled, and then she sighed. “How you do love such things, Cassy,” she said. “I wish you could live in the country.”
Cassy came over and put her arms around her mother’s neck. “I don’t mind so much now that I can go to the beautiful Dallas place, and now that I have Miss Morning-Glory. Oh, mother, it is so lovely to have her.”