“But I’ll never have those natural curls, Molly. It isn’t fair!”
“I’ll give you my hair any time you want it,” asserted Greta, and although she smiled as she said this, the girls knew that she would gladly exchange any of her advantages for Jean’s.
“I have it,” said Jean, suddenly, “Sybil, of course. She will be our S. P. sibyl. It was stupendous stupidity in me not to think of that at once.” Nan and Phoebe, who had just joined the group of three, agreed at once with the fact of Jean’s stupidity and Jean pretended to be deeply offended. But they were interested at once when Jean said that this sibyl would find her own fates instead of telling other people theirs.
The story of Greta’s substitution for the real Greta was soon told to them all, disagreeable facts like those Molly had overheard all omitted. “He probably worked over me when he found me half drowned in Lake Michigan, girls,” said Greta, anxious to do justice to poor Jacob Klein. “So I do owe my life to him, and it was probably the liquor that made him—the way he was.”
Greta was a happy girl to sleep on an extra cot kept for guests and to have her sharing in the gay doings taken as a matter of course. She so insisted upon doing more than her share of little tasks that Jean dubbed her the “Relief Corps” and told Grace that she might just as well let Greta help whoever had charge of meals for the week. But they began to call her Sybil until she said that she knew that magic had been worked and that she was a different person altogether. “Well,” said Nan, “since you are really not Greta at all, Sybil is as much your name as that. You are probably a sort of nice pixy. And that makes me think, Jean, the boys are now calling us the Sibyl Pixies!”
With the rest Sybil went to a great picnic celebration gotten up by the boys, and Billy asked Jean what the girls had done to her to make her look so different.
“We have not done anything, Billy, except to make her have happy times. It’s that she has some respectable clothes now and doesn’t have to kill herself working. The village women must have shamed Mrs. Klein into getting her a decent dress for the funeral and the neat skirt and middy and sweater that she has for every day is as good as anything we are wearing out here. She told me that she borrowed the money for those, but that they didn’t cost much in the little town.”
“Poor kid! Isn’t it awful what some are up against?”
“Yes; and I never thought about it before. I’m always going to think more about other girls and not take everything for granted after this. By the way, Billy, I’ve a lot to tell you some time.”
“Why not now?”