“There,” she said, “that will make you feel better. Taste it. It is good.” I could not eat their cake, because she used goose grease instead of butter, but I didn’t want to hurt her feelings and I pretended to take a bite. When she was not looking I stuffed it into the wastepaper basket.
“Now never mind about your sister no more,” she said kindly. “The sun will shine in your window some day.”
I was still sniffing and crying, and I said:
“It looks as if it were going to rain to-day.”
“Vell then,” she said, “it vill not be dry.”
VIII
I WAS at an age—nearly eighteen now—when girls want and need chums and confidantes. I was bubbling over with impulses that needed an outlet, and only foolish young things like myself were capable of understanding me. With Ellen gone, I sought and found girl friends I believed to be congenial.
My sister Ada, because of her superiority in age and character to me, would not condescend to chum with me. Nevertheless, she heartily disapproved of my choice in friends, and constantly reiterated that my tastes were low. Life was a serious matter to Ada, who had enormous ambitions, and had already been promised a position on our chief newspaper, to which she had contributed poems and stories. To Ada, I was a frivolous, silly young thing, who needed constantly to be squelched, and she undertook to do the squelching, unsparingly, herself.
“Since we are obliged,” said Ada, “to live in a neighborhood with people who are not our equals, I think it a good plan to keep to ourselves. That’s the only way to be exclusive. Now, that Gertie Martin” (Gertie was my latest friend) “is a noisy American girl. She talks through her nose, and is always criticizing the Canadians and comparing them with the Yankees. As for that Lu Fraser” (another of my friends) “she can’t even speak the Queen’s English properly, and her uncle keeps a saloon.”
Though I stoutly defended my friends, Ada’s nagging had an unconscious effect upon me, and for a time I saw very little of the girls.