“Now, I won’t help you with your essay,” she said as she went out of the door again.
Weenie, the essay on her mind, wished she had let well alone.
“You help, will you, Clif?” she said.
“Not I,” said Clif, “I told you, you were a little sneak.”
Weenie’s young, brown face flamed with sudden passion.
“It’s always the way,” she said, “you’re always against me, all of you—if it had been Dolly or Phyl—mother’s the same, and doctor—t-t-think I don’t n-n-notice, don’t you?”
She flung away out of the room and went rushing blindly down the orchard before the boys, startled at the suddenness of her outbreak, could speak.
“What a little spit-fire!” Clif said; then settled comfortably down to his pipe again.
He was very fond of these three little step-sisters of his, but he never even attempted to understand the vagaries of such queer little beings. To “girls’ ways” he and the other boys always used to put everything down that they could not understand, and this sudden flaring of Weenie’s was, he supposed, one of the “ways.”
But Weenie, unknown to every one, with her [273] ]fourteenth birthday, and the lengthened frocks her long legs demanded, had gotten to herself a brand-new trouble that she hugged daily to keep warm. She had taken it into her head that she was unappreciated by her family, misunderstood, uncared for.