She smiled wanly. “O, almost always, it seems, sir,” she declared. “I have worn long dresses—almost long—for years, and of course you can’t do much with long skirts. And then I always looked so queer, even in games like Green Gravel and On the Green Carpet that I—hardly ever played. And—they’ve called me Bouncing Bet ever since before I was six.”
Betty Pogany’s self-control was really exceptional for her years. But the girl had never before known real, understanding sympathy. On a sudden her eyes filled with tears which overflowed upon her fair pink cheeks. Once more, as she reached for her pocket handkerchief, Meadowcroft saw Isabel Phillips’s picture of the baby giant in tears. But the girl controlled herself almost at once and tried to smile.
“I pretended—after a little—I guess when I was about eight—that I didn’t care, and I kept on pretending,” she owned, finding it curiously easy as she went on to speak after her years of reserve. “But I did care—I cared so that it seemed almost to kill me, and—I care now. And even now, I’d just love to play tag and Puss-in-the-Corner and the very babiest games. And sometimes I just hate to be at the head of my class, and I’d like to waste time in school instead of always studying, and even to be real bad, just to see how it would feel. But you can’t, of course, when you’re bigger than everyone in school, even the teacher. I never was even spoken to in school in all my life, but sometimes I dream I am. I dream that Miss Sherman says: ‘Why, Betty Pogany, a great big girl like you!’ And the boys all grinning and everybody in school looking at me!”
As she glanced up, Meadowcroft smiled kindly. The girl smiled frankly, too. Apparently she didn’t lack a sense of humor.
“You don’t admire compulsory virtue, I take it?” he queried.
She smiled ruefully.
“That’s a good name for it,” she observed. “Rose Harrow spoke a piece once in the intermediate school that was just like that and like me. It began—
‘I don’t know how it came about
I put my sacque on wrong-side-out,
I didn’t take it off all day,