“It’s Annie Gibson. My father keeps a candy store.”
“Does he? Why does that bell ring? Isn’t the lady pretty who teaches me? She thinks I read very well indeed, for—for—me.”
“Pooh! You’d ought to hear me! I’m in the Fifth Reader. I speak pieces, examination days. Your dress is awful nice and stylish. I bet you didn’t have that made in your old California. I bet your grandmother had to give it to you.”
“Annie, you shouldn’t say ‘I bet.’ Grandmother c’rected me, myself, for doing it. My grandmother is a very in-tell-i-gent woman, my father says, an’ I’m to watch out for the way she talks; ’cause she never says anything ’nelegant. But I think your frock is pretty, too. It’s redder’n mine, an’ more ruffley, isn’t it? I think you are very nice to look at. Your eyes are black, aren’t they? And your hair is nice an’ straight. An’ what beautiful big feet you have, an’ hands! Why, your hands are a’most twice as big’s mine!”
Poor Annie Gibson didn’t know whether to laugh or “get mad;” but there was no doubting the sincere and admiring curiosity with which Steenie Calthorp examined this other specimen of girlhood; but the final tones of the bell called both away toward the house.
Which, however, Steenie did not enter. Her attention had suddenly been attracted by a commotion in the street, and everything new appealed to her curiosity.
“My! I wonder what those boys are doing! What—What—What!”
With a shriek of delight that penetrated the building she was deserting, the child darted from the enclosure,—through the crowd of grinning boys straight to the cause of all their mirth. “My Sutro! My Sutro! My own, ownest Tito!”
“Caramba! My angel! Is it thou? At last—at last!”