"There, I surely have done well; haven't been mad with any one this week, which is more than the other girls can say;" and there never came any thought that the sisters were hurt over her manner, for, indeed, she had worked herself up to the bitter belief, that they did not want her, she was so ugly, and so unlike them in all ways.
Now what puzzled her was the girls. Here she had worked (yes, she thought she had worked), she certainly ought to be improved, and yet they seemed to think no more of her than before. Way down in Olive's heart, was a longing,—choked and starved, that was beginning to assert itself. When home held mother and father and everything that could make a girl contented, she had not felt, or rather, listened to it; she compelled herself to be without it; but now, when they were left alone, when their daily life and happiness was so utterly dependent upon each other, she began to realize how she was out of the loving circle that bound her sisters together, and what a gulf of her own make, seemed to lie between them. She stood beside it in frequent contemplation, but never recognized her own handiwork, so she eyed it bitterly, and thought them cruelly unkind.
This was what she was thinking about as she plunged through the storm, looking like an animated snow-figure, so powdered was she; and regarding herself for a moment, Olive went round to the back door, so as to dispose of her ladened garments and brush off her shoes This done, she went into the kitchen, where a warm atmosphere still lingered, and, preferring to be alone, sat down there, with her feet in the oven and her chin in her hands, and once more fell into a brown study. Only a few minutes later, Kittie came into the dining-room for something, and on going back, failed to close the door, so that the murmur of voices came quite distinctly out to the quiet kitchen. A discussion was warmly in progress, and in a minute Olive started out of her reverie at hearing her name spoken.
"What's the use? Olive knows, or ought to know better." It was Ernestine's voice.
"But, mama says," interposed Bea, mildly persuasive, "that we don't try hard enough; we give up too soon."
"Bother," cried Kat, "would she have us always playing the 'gentle sister, meek and mild,' and go whining about Olive as though her company was a great honor. I'm sure we had a season of always begging her to go with us, and didn't she snap us up like a rat-trap?"
"She—well—she's very odd you know," said Bea, wondering if her quiver of defense would outlast the arrows of complaint.
"Yes, odd, as an odd shoe," laughed Kat with a yawn.
"What did mama say to you, Bea?" asked Ernestine.
"She said that Olive's greatest fault was being so nasty and sensitive, and that because she was rather plain and—"