"Oh, yes, I live here now," sighed the girl; "that is, if you can call it living—what I do."
"What do you do?" asked Pollyanna interestedly.
"Do? I'll tell you what I do," cried the other, with sudden bitterness. "From morning till night I sell fluffy laces and perky bows to girls that laugh and talk and KNOW each other. Then I go home to a little back room up three flights just big enough to hold a lumpy cot-bed, a washstand with a nicked pitcher, one rickety chair, and me. It's like a furnace in the summer and an ice box in the winter; but it's all the place I've got, and I'm supposed to stay in it—when I ain't workin'. But I've come out to-day. I ain't goin' to stay in that room, and I ain't goin' to go to any old library to read, neither. It's our last half-holiday this year—and an extra one, at that; and I'm going to have a good time—for once. I'm just as young, and I like to laugh and joke just as well as them girls I sell bows to all day. Well, to-day I'm going to laugh and joke."
Pollyanna smiled and nodded her approval.
"I'm glad you feel that way. I do, too. It's a lot more fun—to be happy, isn't it? Besides, the Bible tells us to;—rejoice and be glad, I mean. It tells us to eight hundred times. Probably you know about 'em, though—the rejoicing texts."
The pretty girl shook her head. A queer look came to her face.
"Well, no," she said dryly. "I can't say I WAS thinkin'—of the
Bible."
"Weren't you? Well, maybe not; but, you see, MY father was a minister, and he—"
"A MINISTER?"
"Yes. Why, was yours, too?" cried Pollyanna, answering something she saw in the other's face.