Being away from home, visiting and having things unpleasant! It was so easy to bring tears to her eyes now, and she so rarely cried at home. She just had to choke back the tears that were forcing themselves up her throat and trying to reach her eyes.
Why should she have been made so miserable? Why was Rosa so unreasonable? What if she was fat, wasn’t Nancy thin? Didn’t her friends always call her “skinny” and she hadn’t even bothered about it any more than she had fussed over the “Nincy-niney-nanny-notey in a red petticoaty,” Ted’s fighting chant or battle cry, as their mother always termed his childish taunt.
Rosa was going downstairs—Nancy heard her grumbling as she went, and it seemed Margot had carried out her threat, for Rosa was talking back and scoffing at the commands evidently sent by her father.
“Serves her right!” was Nancy’s first impulsive criticism. Then again came the thought of Ted. How she and he would quarrel, how she would declare she hoped her mother would do all sorts of things to him (which, of course, she never did), and then in the end, just as Ted was realizing that something in the way of discipline might possibly be visited upon him, Nancy would always relent. She would even step between him and the impending evil.
That was exactly how she felt now. After all, Rosa was such a baby. She hadn’t learned from contact with companions, for, according to her own story, she had never had a real chum.
“Ted, Ted, Ted!” kept persistingly challenging Nancy, until she knew she would have to do something for Rosa. It was not being generous, really, it was just doing what she had been brought up to do—to be brave enough to be humble.
She flew to her mirror and daubbed at her eyes; they looked rather puckery. Then she flirted her powder puff around her nose, that looked decidedly shiny.
“Wish I had put on my red dress,” she told her reflection in the glass, “but there’s no time now. If I run along with Rosa, surely Uncle Frederic won’t scold her.”
On the broad stair landing, where the big brass lanterns and the lovely soft palms opened the way into the living room, she found the surprised Rosa.
“Why, Nancy!” she exclaimed. “I thought—”