When the noon whistle was blowing up at the brick yard, a shadow darkened our pine board. It was the New Boy. One of his cheeks protruded extravagantly. Silently he held out to me a vast pink substance of rock-like hardness, impaled on a stick. Then, with an obvious effort, more spiritual than physical, he extracted from his pocket a third of the kind, for Mary Elizabeth, on whose presence he had not counted. We accepted gratefully, I in the full spirit of the offer. Three minutes later he and I were at our respective dinner tables, trying, I suppose, to discuss this surreptitious first course simultaneously with our soup; and Mary Elizabeth, on her way home, was blissfully partaking of her hors d’œuvre, unviolated by any soup.
“What are the new children like, I wonder?” said Somebody Grown. “I see there are two. I don’t know a thing about the people, but we can’t call till the woman at least gets her curtains up.”
I pondered this. “Why?” I ventured at last.
“Because she wouldn’t want to see us,” was the reply.
Were curtains, then, so important that one might neither call nor be called on without them? What other possible explanation could there be? Perhaps Mary Elizabeth’s mother had no curtains and that was why our mothers did not know her.
“Mary Elizabeth is going to help do the work for the New Family, and live there,” I said at last. “Won’t it be nice to have her to play with?”
“You must be very kind to her,” somebody said.
“Kind to her!” It was my first horrified look into the depths of the social condescensions. Kind to her—when I remembered what we shared! I thought of saying hotly that she was my best friend. But I was silent. There was, after all, no way to make anybody understand what had opened to me that morning.