Marty, however, declared himself "worked to a frazzle" and he disappeared immediately after the noon meal, for fear Janice would find something more for him to do.
"Wal, child, it does look nice," admitted Aunt Almira, coming to view the front yard. "And you do have a way with Marty."
"Just the same," giggled Janice, "he doesn't like girls."
"Sho, child! he doesn't know what he likes—a boy like him," returned her aunt.
Sunday was a rainy day, and Janice felt her spirits falling again. It really rained too hard at church time for her to venture out; but she saw that her relatives seldom put themselves out to attend church, anyway. Walky Dexter appeared in an oilskin-covered cart, drawn by Josephus (who actually looked water-soaked and dripped from every angle), delivering the Sunday papers, which came up from the city. The family gave up most of their time all day to the gaudy magazine supplements and the so-called "funny sections" which were a part of these sheets.
Janice finally retired to her depressing bedroom and wrote a long letter to her father which she tried to make cheerful, but into which crept a note of loneliness and disappointment. It wasn't just like talking to Daddy himself; but it seemed to help some.
It enabled her, too, to write shorter letters to friends back in Greensboro and she managed to hide from them much of her homesickness. She could write of the beauty of Poketown itself; for it was beautiful. It was only the people who were so—well! so different.
Janice welcomed Monday morning. Although she had nearly completed her junior year at the Greensboro High School, and knew that she would not gain much help from Miss Scattergood, the girl loved study and she hoped that the Poketown girls would prove to be better companions than they had appeared when she had visited the school.
So she started for the old red schoolhouse in quite a cheerful frame of mind, in spite of Marty's prophecy that "she'd soon git sick o' that old maid." It was not Miss Scattergood that Janice had reason to be "sick of!" The stranger in Poketown had to admit before the day was over that she had never in her life dreamed of such ill-bred girls as some of these who occupied the back seats in 'Rill Scattergood's school.
They had no respect for the little school-teacher, and had Miss Scattergood taken note of all their follies she must have been in a pitched battle with her older pupils all the time. Some of these ill-behaved girls were older than Janice by many months; and they plainly did not come to school to study or to learn. They passed notes back and forth to some of the older boys all day long; when Miss Scattergood called on them to recite, if they did not feel just like it, they refused to obey; and of course their example was bad for the smaller children.