“I hope you brought a lot of food, for I’m good and hungry to-day,” she said.  “I ate so many biscuits for breakfast that I left myself only five to bring for lunch.  Our cook makes the same number every day and I just see-saw my lunch and breakfast in a very uncomfortable way.  So many biscuits for breakfast, so few for lunch!” That jolly, plump laugh of Mamie Sue’s is going to save some kind of a serious situation yet, friend leather Louise.

If you are the kind of person that has dumb love for your friends, you see more about them than folks who can express themselves on the sacred subject.  That lunch party with those five jolly girls out in the side yard of the Byrd Academy gave me a funny, uneasy feeling, and I now know the reason.  Roxanne Byrd brought one small apple, two very thin biscuits, and some cracked hickory nuts.  She carefully ate less than she brought.  Something took my appetite when I saw her eat so little, and there was a quantity of food left for somebody to consume, and she hungry.  I was afraid we’d have to send for a doctor for Mamie Sue after she had cleared my large napkin we spread to put it all on.  The Jamison biscuits are cut on the same plump pattern that Mamie Sue is and all my sandwiches were good and thick.

But when Roxanne didn’t eat I suffered.  One of the most awful situations in life is to have one of your friends be the sort of girl that has a town named after her and wonderful family portraits and such dainty hands and feet that shabby shoes don’t even count, and then to know that she is hungry most of the time from being too poor to get enough food.  For two days I have had to keep my mind off Roxanne Byrd to make myself swallow one single morsel of anything to eat.  I suspected it at the school lunch but I was certain of it from the way Lovelace Peyton consumed the first cooky I offered him over the fence.  Thank goodness, he has no family pride located in his stomach, and when my feelings overcome me he is the outlet.  I can feed him anything at all hours and he is always ready for more.  It may be wrong to keep it from his sister when I know how she feels about it, but I can’t help that.  I have to fill him up.  His legs look too empty for me.

But, to do Lovelace Peyton justice, he has got his own kind of pride, and I understand it better than I do Roxanne’s.

“For these nice eatings, I’ll cut a cat open for nothing and let you see inside what makes him go, if you get the cat,” he offered, after he had eaten two slices of buttered bread and the breast of half a chicken out behind one of the lilac bushes in his ancestral garden that is now mine.

Now, I call that a fair proposition, considering the circumstances, and I wish I could make Roxanne be as sensible in spirit.  But I can’t.  Family pride is a terrible thing, like lunacy or hysterics when a person gets it bad.

However, I decided to talk to Roxanne about her financial situation, and I began as far off from the subject as I could, so as to approach it with caution.