“Listen, Lilian,” she said, going back to the couch, “I haven’t any mother at all. That will seem strange to you, who have seen me laughing around here, happy and singing most of the time. But I haven’t,—and I know that nothing ever will quite make up. That letter you have begun—just try to realize that no matter what happens to me,—whatever hard thing I may have to go through, I can’t write such a letter as that.”
Lilian stared at Peggy in surprise. Why, she had supposed the little Miss Parsons had everything.
“You are the one to be envied after all,” said Peggy. “No matter how many of the girls like you, or how much they care, it isn’t anything to the way a person’s own mother cares. And if you want them to, the girls will care, too. We’ll begin now to make them.”
“It’s too late—I’m going home.”
“Going home after your mother saved to send you?—going home without the least little bit of a try to bring things your way?—going home and taking away your mother’s chance to enjoy college through you?—oh, no, you’re not going home!”
“Well,” hesitancy showed in Lilian’s manner, “I’ve been packing my trunk. I made up my mind that the girls would never have to see my homely clothes any more.”
“Stay a week and—try, will you?” pleaded Peggy. “Katherine and I would miss you awfully if you went home now.”
“You and Katherine? Would you really?”
“Yes, really and truly. Why, when we first knew you here, we said you were the kind of girl we wanted for a friend, and that we were sure we were going to like you,” fibbed kind little Peggy, striving to find in her memory a record that they had noticed her at all.
“Then it isn’t everybody in the house that feels as some of those girls do?”