“I have a middle name that I don’t need,” said Carin with a laugh. “It’s Louisa. Now, what if I should give that to you? ‘Louisa Marr!’ How would that sound?”
“Mr. Summers is coming up to see us by and by,” said Azalea, taking hold of Paralee’s arm with a girlish squeeze, “and he can name you properly. He’s a Methodist preacher.” Paralee nodded.
“I know,” she said. “Once he came to see my pa. He said if pa could be got to an X-ray, or an X-ray could be got to him, maybe he’d be cured. But it was just talk. He didn’t do nothing,” she added with a return to her old bitterness.
“Probably he couldn’t do anything,” said Azalea, swift to defend the husband of her own “pretend cousin,” Barbara Summers, whom she had picked out of all the world to be her “kin” since she had none of her own. “Mr. Summers is poor, too, and there are many people that he must do things for.”
“Well, he didn’t do nothing for us,” said the girl. Then she brooded for a moment in her heavy way. “And we didn’t do nothing for ourselves,” she broke out. “That was what made me mad—we didn’t do nothing for ourselves!”
“Your folks didn’t know how,” said Azalea. “That was it—they didn’t know how. They couldn’t help themselves any more than if they had been children.”
“That’s what they are,” the girl cried. “They’re children—they don’t know nothing. They won’t do nothing. Oh, it’s so awful—not to have things to eat; to be like this.” She held out her stump of a hand. “To be like dad—not able to move! Ain’t it a curse?”
“It must be changed,” said Carin decidedly. “It can be and it shall.”
“You don’t know,” replied the mountain girl with a return of despair. “There’s so much to change.”
“Braid your hair, Paralee,” commanded Azalea. “Then we’ll have a lesson. I’ll teach you more this morning than you ever learned in any one lesson in your life. I noticed last week that you knew how to study better than anyone in the school. You could keep your mind on a thing, and that’s much more than half the battle. Oh, we’ll make a teacher of you, never fear.”