Sally did not find the desired sympathy.  She was so full of her impressions that she felt Mother and Aunt should be all afire and aflame for her new friendship.  Instead of that, the two kept on mending the stockings; Father did not even look up from his paper and Edi had only a satirical remark for sympathy.  Sally had rather a bad reputation for making friendships.  Almost every week she saw some one who appealed to her so much, that she must make a friendship at once; but the friendships were mostly of short duration, for she had imagined something else than she often found on looking closer.  This made her quite unhappy at the time, but the next week she had already found some one else who filled her thoughts.

The last unfortunate friendship had brought forth Edi’s satire to a greater degree.  The tailor of Upper Wood had three sons, and since the father on his wanderings had spent some time in Vienna he gave his sons, in remembrance of the beautiful days which he spent there, the names of three Austrian grand dukes.  It was this strange name that had first attracted Sally; to that was added that Leopold, the oldest of the sons, who had lived with his grandfather until now, but had come recently to Upper Wood, always wore elegant jackets and pants after the latest cut.  Leopold had entered Sally’s class and his appearance had at once inspired her.  But he was so small and dainty that he received the name Leopoldy from the whole school.  The rumor had preceded Leopold, that he had staid three years in the same class in the town where his grandfather lived.  So Edi looked down on Leopoldy from an elevation of a fourth class boy and noticed with scorn how Sally found pleasure in the little fellow and befriended him.  But that did not last long for, after a trial of a week, Leopoldy was set back two classes, since he had been put in the fifth class on account of his years, but not his deserts.  In these eight days Sally had discovered, with sorrow, that Leopoldy was unusually silly, and Sally was glad that the enormous gap that lies between the fifth and third class, made easier the rupture of this friendship which could not continue, for nothing could be done with Leopoldy.  So it happened that no one listened with sympathy to the enthusiastic description which Sally gave of her new friends, for each one remembered Leopoldy, and that was not inspiring.

This general coolness angered Sally very much.  She knew her new friends if they would only believe her.  All ought to be so interested in this mother and her Erick, that they would want to know everything possible about them, and now no one asked a question and they hardly listened to her communication.  That was too much; Sally had to relieve her tension.  She suddenly broke forth to Edi, who was entirely lost in his book:  “Although you read a thousand books one after the other, and act as if one did not tell anything, and you think that one must have no friendship with any human being on this earth but only for the thousand-thousand-year-old Egyptians, yet you might be glad to have a friend like Erick.”