"No, 'twon't," declared the boy, rubbing the ear that had received the greater number of her blows. "I knew how to do it before, didn't I? My, Janice Day! but you can slam a fella."
"I wish I could hurt you more," declared the girl. "You've made me enough trouble."
She marched on, leaving the scattered crowd of urchins to gather again about Arlo Junior, but now in a scoffing rather than in an admiring crowd. The bubble of Arlo Junior's conceit had been punctured. He had been whipped by a girl!
"Now," thought Janice, as she went along home, "I would not want Daddy to know I did that. Fighting a boy on the street! I guess Miss Peckham, who is always peering through her blinds at what I do, if she had seen me would be sure to say I was misbehaving because I had no mother to make me mind. As though I wouldn't behave just as well for Daddy as I used to for dear mother!
"Only I haven't really behaved very well to-day," she went on, reviewing the matter to herself. "I don't care! Yes, I do too! No matter what Arlo Weeks, Junior, did, I oughtn't to have fought him on the street like that. Oh, dear!" mused the girl, "I don't know whether I am sorry I hit Arlo Junior or am sorry that I'm not sorry. It's awfully confusing."
She choked back a sob, dashed the tears from her eyes, and suddenly saw that the hazy object she had been looking at for the past minute was really a human figure squatting on the side porch steps of the Day's cottage.
"Why! who can that be?" thought Janice Day, staring with all her might at the odd-looking creature perched thus on the steps, with a bulging old-fashioned black oilcloth bag beside her.
It was a woman in a cheap, homemade calico dress, and with rows upon rows of flounces on the skirt. She sat on the next-to-the-top step of the porch while her shoes were planted flat-footed on the walk. She was very short-waisted, while her limbs, accentuated by the model of the flounced skirt seemed enormously long.
Indeed, she looked like the halves of two people mysteriously glued together. Her nether limbs without doubt belonged to a giantess; her body although broad and sturdy, was almost dwarflike. Her arms were very short.
Above this strange figure was a fat, baby-like face, with staring, light-blue eyes and whisps of straw-colored hair laid flat to her, head under a close fitting hat.