“Mean old thing! Always buttin’ in! Can’t let us have no fun at all! Some other kid’ll find Thelma’s sapphire and keep it offen her—”
“It isn’t a sapphire,” Sally said dully, her brush beginning to describe new semi-circles on the pine floor. “It’s like she said—just a piece of broken old bottle. And she said she’d try to find you a doll, Thelma.”
“You said it was a sapphire, Sally. You said it was worth millions and millions of dollars. It was a sapphire, long as you said it was, Sally!” Thelma sobbed, as grieved for the loss of illusion as for the loss of her treasure.
“I reckon I’m plumb foolish to go on play-acting all the time,” Sally Ford said dully.
The three little girls and the 16-year-old “mother” of them scrubbed in silence for several minutes, doggedly hurrying to make up for lost time. Then Thelma, who could never nurse grief or anger, spoke cheerfully:
“Reckon the new kid’s gettin’ her phys’cal zamination. When I come into the ’sylum you had to nearly boil me alive. ’N Mrs. Stone cut off all my hair clean to the skin. ’N ’en nobody wouldn’t ’dopt me ’cause I looked like sich a scarecrow. But I got lotsa hair now, ain’t I, Sal-lee?”
“Oh, somebody’ll be adopting you first thing you know, and then I won’t have any Thelma,” Sally smiled at her.
“Say, Sal-lee” Clara wheedled, “why didn’t nobody ever ’dopt you? I think you’re awful pretty. Sometimes it makes me feel all funny and cry-ey inside, you look so awful pretty. When you’re play-actin’,” she amended honestly. Sally Ford moved the big brush with angry vigor, while her pale face colored a dull red. “I ain’t—I mean, I’m not pretty at all, Clara. But thank you just the same. I used to want to be adopted, but now I don’t. I want to hurry up and get to be eighteen so’s I can leave the asylum and make my own living. I want—” but she stopped herself in time. Not to these open-mouthed, wide-eared children could she tell her dream of dreams.
“But why wasn’t you adopted, Sal-lee?” Betsy, the baby of the group, insisted. “You been here forever and ever, ain’t you?”
“Since I was four years old,” Sally admitted from between lips held tight to keep them from trembling. “When I was little as you, Betsy, one of the big girls told me I was sickly and awf’ly tiny and scrawny when I was brought in, so nobody wanted to adopt me. They don’t like sickly babies,” she added bitterly. “They just want fat little babies with curly hair. Seems to me like the Lord oughta made all orphans pretty, with golden curly hair.”