Possessing neither beauty, style, pretty clothes, nor all the dozen other things that make the ordinary girl popular, her very unusualness gave her a distinction, and inside of two weeks she was the best-known girl in the whole school. To be counted as one of her friends was an honor, and to be able to say, “Katherine told me this,” or, “Katherine did this up at our house,” was to incite the envy of less favored ones. The Uranians, the most exclusive and select girl’s society in the school, voted her in as a member because they must have all the prominent girls, although they generally scorned both worth and brains, if clothed in poor garments, and great was their chagrin to find that their disdained rivals, the clever and democratic Dramatic Club, had held a special meeting and taken her in the afternoon before. Urania had not noticed that Katherine had been wearing the Dramatic Club pin a whole day because she had stuck it over a hole in her stocking which she did not have time to mend.
How the Winnebagos exulted because Hinpoha had been polite enough to invite her to the circus and she had consequently landed in their bosom the first thing! No other group of girls would ever know her as intimately as they would. The Camp Fire idea appealed to her from the start. The Open Door Lodge was a paradise for her. The ladder stairs were a constant source of delight.
“One would think you had never climbed a ladder before,” said Hinpoha, watching curiously as Katherine climbed up and down and up again just for the fun of the thing. Katherine draped her feet around a rung to support herself and sat on the top bar.
“I never did,” she said simply.
“Never climbed a ladder!” said Hinpoha incredulously. “Why, where did you live?”
“In Arkansas,” answered Katherine significantly. “Do you know,” she went on, “that until I came east I had never seen a flight of stairs? I had never seen a flight of stairs!” she repeated, as Hinpoha and the other girls in the Lodge gasped unbelievingly. “We lived in a one-story house, the floor level with the ground, so you just walked in from the outside without going up steps. The house was in the middle of a big farm, as level and flat as this floor. I rode ten miles to school and that was built just like our house. Oh, of course I knew there were such things as stairs, because I had seen them in pictures, but until I came here I had never seen any.”
“But didn’t you see any when you went traveling?” asked Hinpoha, still incredulous.
“Never went traveling,” returned Katherine. “It took considerable hustling to stay right where we were. One year the locusts ate up everything, down to the clothes on the line, and we couldn’t get enough feed to fatten the stock; the next year there were prairie fires that licked the earth as clean as a plate; one year the cattle all died of disease, and so on. It wasn’t until this year that we came out ahead enough to send me here to school.”
And when the girls heard what a hard time she had had they adored her more than ever because she could be so funny when she had had so little to be funny about.
Another thing that charmed her beyond measure was the color of the autumn leaves. The Winnebagos could hardly pull her past a tree. “There was only one tree in sight on our farm,” she would tell them, “and that wasn’t green like the trees are in the east; it was just a dusty, greenish gray. And the leaves didn’t turn colors in the fall; they just withered up and dropped off. Oh-h-h, look at that one over there—isn’t it just too gorgeous for words?”