"What did she say?" asked Aunt Ada.
"She said she was born in England and so was her mother, so of course she was English, and besides, although her father was once American, that now he lives in England so he must be English, too. She makes fun of everything, or at least she sniffs at us and our ways all the time. Now, is that polite, Aunt Ada? I live in the west, but I'd be ashamed to make fun of the east."
"I think Mary will learn better after awhile, when she has been here longer."
"I wish I could show her what my mother wrote to me in the letter that I had from her this morning," said Polly. Then, with a sudden thought. "Aunt Ada, won't you read it aloud to all three of us?"
"Bring it to me," said Miss Ada, "and I will see."
Polly ran off and came back with the letter which her aunt read over carefully, nodding approvingly from time to time. "Where are the others?" she asked presently.
"Out on the porch," Polly told her.
Miss Ada picked up her knitting bag and Polly followed her to a sheltered corner where Molly and Mary were playing with a store of pebbles they had picked up on the shore.
"Polly has had such a nice letter from her mother," said Miss Ada. "Don't you all want to hear it? She gives such interesting accounts of things out there, and Mary will get quite an idea of ranch life from it." She sat down and read the pages which were full of a pleasant recital of every-day doings, interesting to those unaccustomed to the great west, and more interesting to Polly. At the last came these words:
"There is one thing I want my little girl to remember: the essence of good breeding comes from a good heart. It is both unkind and ill-bred to give offense in a house where hospitality is shown you, to find fault or criticise what is set before you, to draw comparisons between the locality where you live and that which you are visiting so that the latter will appear in a bad light. Persons who have not been accustomed to the society of well-bred people think it is very smart to find fault with things which are different from those with which they have been familiar. Now, I don't want my Polly to be that way, and I must ask her not to be so rude as to abuse hospitality by belittling the customs of a house or the town, state or locality in which it is. I want my Polly to be considered a true lady, even if she is from the wild and woolly west."