Belle shook her head.
"That wouldn't be like having her for my very own, Mamie; I'd like to make believe that she was my sister if I had her, she's such a very real doll."
"S'pose none of us have her; but somebody who is a stranger to the school," said Lily Norris, who had just drawn near, and who easily guessed what the other children were talking about. "Wouldn't that be a shocking occurrence?"
"Yes," said Belle, giving a long sigh at the possibility of such a catastrophe. "Shocking! But we'll have to bear it, perhaps."
"Belle!" called Bessie Bradford from the other end of the piazza where she stood behind the flower-table; "Belle, how long you've been away from our table!" and recalled thus to a sense of her duties as saleswoman, Belle ran back to her post, which she had been tempted to quit for a closer view of the coveted doll, so often seen, but of whose perfections she never tired.
"I hope Mr. Powers will be the one to give the most for the doll, so Belle can have it," said Lily to Mamie, when Belle had left them.
"Don't you want it yourself?" asked Mamie.
"Yes," answered Lily; "but I think I'd 'most rather Belle would have it than any one. She seems to feel as if it would be a kind of company for her; and she's very lonesome sometimes. She don't have such large families as we do, you know; nothing but herself and her papa. Yes, I think I would rather Belle should have it than to have it myself."
Mamie felt that she could not make up her mind to be as generous as Lily, were the opportunity offered to her; and still she wished that she could be so. Lily was not "one bit selfish," she saw; neither was Belle, spite of her intense desire to possess the doll, at all inclined to be jealous or ill-tempered about it, as Mamie felt she might be herself if another child carried off the prize.
"Belle used to fret and cry like every thing if she didn't have what she wanted," she said to herself; "but she doesn't now. I wonder why;" and again there came a disagreeable consciousness to Mamie that she had not improved in this respect as much as her little schoolmate.