"No, I'm awake. Shall I dress right aways for school?"
"No. Put on your old brown gingham once."
Phœbe made a wry face. "Ugh, that ugly brown gingham! What for did anybody ever buy brown when there are such pretty colors in the stores?"
A moment later she pushed back the gay quilt and sat on the edge of the bed. The first gleams of day-break sent bright streaks of light into her room as she sat on the high walnut bed and swung her bare feet back and forth.
"It's the first time I wasn't glad for school," she soliloquized softly. "I used to could hardly wait still, and I'd be glad this time if we didn't have that teacher from Phildelphy. Miss Virginia Lee her name is, and she's pretty like the name, but I don't like her! Guess she's that stuck up, comin' from the city, that she'll laugh all the time at us country people. I don't like people that poke fun at me, you bet I don't! I vonder now, mebbe I am funny to look at, that she laughed at me. But if I was I think somebody would 'a' told me long ago. I don't see what for she laughed so at me."
She sprang from the bed and ran to the window, pulled the cord of the green shade and sent it rattling to the top. Then she stood on tiptoe before the mirror in the walnut bureau, but the glass was hung too high for a satisfactory scrutiny of her features. She pushed a cane-seated chair before the bureau, knelt upon it and brought her face close to the glass.
"Um," she surveyed herself soberly. "Well, now, mebbe if my hair was combed I'd look better."
She pulled the tousled braids, opened them and shook her head until the golden hair hung about her face in all its glory.
"Why"—she gasped at the sudden change she had wrought, then laughed aloud from sheer childish happiness in her own miracle—"Why," she said gladly, "I ain't near so funny lookin' with my hair opened and down instead of pulled back in two tight plaits! But I wish Aunt Maria'd leave me have curls. I'd have a lot, and long ones, longer'n Mary Warner's."
"Phœbe!" Aunt Maria's voice startled the little girl. "What in the world are you doing lookin' in that glass so? And your knees on a cane-bottom chair! You know better than that. What for are you lookin' at yourself like that? You ought to be ashamed to be so vain."