"Come and see us," said Rosalie; "we're your neighbors now. We've moved in the white house with the big yard on your square, and Alice, our cousin, and her mother have come to live with us. We've never been to a public school before. You live in a white house at the other end of the square. We saw you in the yard."
"I'll come this afternoon," said Emmy Lou, "and I'll bring Hattie. I'll get her now so she'll know you."
But Hattie declined to come. She shook her head decidedly. "They've light dispositions and I've not. My mamma said so about some other little girls I couldn't get along with. I don't want to come, and besides I'm not sure I want to know them."
Which would imply that light dispositions were undesirable apart from Hattie's inability to get along with them! Hattie could be most disturbing.
Towards noon a sudden shower fell, and the class was told to remain in its room for recess and eat its luncheons at its desks.
Across the aisle on the other side of Emmy Lou sat Charlotte Wright. She, too, had shown every disposition to be friendly but Hattie discouraged this also. She leaned from her desk now. "Will you have a piece of my homemade hickory-nut candy?" She spoke with pride. "My mamma let me make it myself on the grate."
On the grate? Why not in the kitchen on the stove? Still that was Charlotte's own affair. More showy than tidy in her dress, she seemed one of those detached and anxious little girls hunting for friends. The kindly impulse was to respond to overtures, Emmy Lou knowing a past where she had needed friends. And besides there was the candy. Hickory-nut candy does not have to look tidy to look good. She had a liberal lunch outspread on the napkin upon her desk, but she had no candy.
But Hattie leaving her desk and approaching, held her back. "No, she won't have any candy," she said, and gathering up Emmy Lou's lunch in the napkin and thus forcing her to follow, walked away.
Whereupon Rosalie and Amanthus, arising and going around to Charlotte, flung back their curls as they crowded into her desk, one on either side of her, and asked for a piece of her candy.
"I don't say it wasn't hard to do," said Hattie, flushed and even apologetic. "But I had to. She's not your kind, and she's not mine."