VIII
The Two Little Bates Girls
They were not at all alike and they were not even sisters—those two little Bates girls. One had curly light hair and the other had bobbed-off black hair. One was slender and the other was plump. One had blue eyes and the other had brown ones and both were as different as different could be, though the names of both came upon Miss Kennedy’s school roll one after the other; first Mamie and then Mary.
Mary had light curls that bobbed in a lively way even in arithmetic class, where everything was rather subdued by hard problems that Miss Kennedy set. Mamie Bates had bobbed black hair that had a way of falling over her forehead when she was bending over work—in brief, Mary Bates was lively and Mamie Bates was not. Mamie Bates acknowledged that arithmetic was about the hardest thing in school but Mary Bates said it was easy, even though Miss Kennedy’s blue pencil went over her paper and made big blue crosses that meant “Wrong” as often as they crossed the papers of Mamie in the same way.
It ought not to have been so. Nevertheless the first quarterly report that Miss Kennedy made out for Mamie and Mary Bates ranked them side by side—seventy-six percent! That’s not a high mark; Miss Kennedy shook her head over both marks. It was surely nothing to be proud of!
Mary Bates refused to show her report.
Mamie Bates hung her head woefully and explained that she had tried the best she knew how—which was right. Both of them decided to try even harder next quarter. And they did try. Mamie Bates mounted up to eighty percent, and in one examination, she achieved eighty-three! “Next time,” urged Miss Kennedy, “see if you can’t make it eighty-five!” Mary Bates did not tell her mark. It may have been that she was ashamed of it or it may have been that she did not want to brag. Nobody knew which.
But when Mamie Bates went home, she told her daddy all about that eighty-three percent and her daddy smiled and said, “Well, if you’ll make the next one ninety instead of eighty-five, and if you’ll keep all the other marks above eighty-three after that, by the end of the next quarter you shall have—What do you want most?”
“A pony and a cart,” laughed Mamie.
“A pony and a cart,” repeated daddy. “A real live pony and a basket cart!”