"Why aint you goin', Mame?" asked Joe, our smallest son, of the girl spending her Christmas holidays with us.
"Wasn't asked," she replied defiantly. "An' what's more, I don't care to go anywheres, neither, if the girls don't act better to me than they done at that party the other night."
Belle raised her head from the Treasurer's book of the House of Refuge.
"Perhaps you weren't nice to them, Mary?"
"Yes, I was too. I smiled whenever one of them looked at me, but they all turned their heads as if they'd never seen me before."
My wife sighed as she bent over her book again. If the difficulty of befriending Mary rested only with outsiders it might have been patiently borne, but there was mother, to whom the girl's presence in the house was a constant grievance.
I had been able to buy a quiet horse and a Mikado cutter for Belle when the snow came, but she had no pleasure out of them during the vacation.
"I'm going to drive downtown, mother," I heard her say one morning. "Would you like to go?"
"Is Mary gaun?"
"I thought of taking her."