"It really was only our business—Amy's and mine. But Stella knew about it. In fact, Stella came to me about Amy in the first place. She wanted to invite Amy and she feared—so she said—that Amy would not have a party dress. I undertook to find her one, and hard enough time I had getting Amy and her mother to agree to use the dress.
"But that," said Janice scornfully, "is a purely personal matter between them and me. I want to ask you girls, though, what you think of a person who, after having given her word to keep the matter a secret, deliberately taunts Amy with the fact that she took the dress from me? That is what I want to know."
The other girls were silent for the moment. Janice Day's scornful question was too pointed to be ignored. Stella broke out again in anger, her voice high and shrill:
"I don't care! So there! She is a dowdy little thing, and she had no business to come to my party, anyway."
"Stella," said the older girl grimly, "you're making yourself awfully ridiculous. And worse. You can't keep a secret. And you don't keep your word. I guess there will be more than Amy Carringford who will be sorry that they ever went to your old party. Now, stop yelling. Here comes Miss Marble."
The flare-up was only the beginning of a very unhappy time at school for Amy Carringford. Nor could Janice escape being unhappy, too, with her new friend.
That Stella was unable to raise any cabal against Janice and Amy, but quite the contrary, made the situation only a degree more bearable for the two friends. Although the other girls did not join Stella Latham in mourning the poor girl who lived in Mullen Lane, the latter felt deeply the fact that she was considered different from her schoolmates.
"Oh, I wish mother would let me go to work," Amy sighed, on more than one occasion, and to Janice's sympathetic ear. "I declare! I'd go out as a servant in somebody's home, if mother would let me. We need the money so."
"Goodness! Don't say such things," pleaded Janice. "We need a servant right now, bad enough. But you would not want to come and scrub and sweep and wash and iron even for daddy and me—you know you wouldn't."
"I don't care. Mother says she must go to work somewhere. I'll then have to come to school on part time only. Somebody must look after the twins and Edna May."