I always wait until everybody has gone down the street with everybody else so they won’t see how lonesome I am.  Crowded lonesomeness is the worst of all.  There are many nice boys and girls just about my age here in Byrdsville; but they can never like me.  I’m glad I found it out before I tried to be friends with any of them.  The first day I came to the Byrd Academy I heard Belle tell Mamie Sue how to treat me, and that is what settled me into this alone state.

“Of course, be polite to her, Mamie Sue,” Belle said, not knowing that I was behind the hat-rack, pinning on my hat.  “But there never was a millionaire in Byrdsville before, and I don’t see how a girl who is that rich can be really nice.  The Bible says that it is harder for a rich man to get to heaven than for a knitting-needle to stick into a camel, because he and it are blunt, I suppose; and it must be just the same with such a rich girl.  Poor child, I am so sorry for her; but we must be very careful.”

“Why, Belle,” said Mamie Sue, in a voice that is always so comfortable because she is nice and fat, “Roxy said she was going to like her a lot, and she’s got Roxy’s lovely house while Roxy has to live in the cottage, which is just as bad as moving into a chicken coop after the Byrd Mansion.  If Roxy likes her, it seems to me we might.  She didn’t turn us out of house and home, as the almanac says.”

“Don’t you see that Roxy has to be nice to her, because if she isn’t we will think it is spite about the house?  Roxy can’t show her resentment, but her friends can.  I’m a friend.”

Belle uses words and talks like a grown person in a really wonderful way.  She is the smartest girl in the rhetoric class and, of course, she knows more than most people, and Mamie Sue realizes that.  So do I. I saw just how they all felt about me, and I don’t blame them—­but I just wish every time Roxanne Byrd smiles at me that I didn’t have to make myself stop and remember that she does it because she has to.

“But I believe Phyllis is a nice girl,” Mamie Sue said.  Mamie Sue reminds me of a nice, fat molasses drop, with her yellow hair and always a brown dress on.

“The city is an awful wicked place, Mamie Sue, even if it is only just a hundred miles away.  Let’s don’t think about the poor thing.”  Belle answered positively, and they went out of the door.

I wanted to sit down and cry as I feel sure any girl has a right to do; only I never have learned how to do it.  Crying with only a governess to listen to and reprove a person is no good at all; only mothers can make crying any comfort, and mine is too feeble to let me do anything but tiptoe in and hold her hand while the nurse watches me and the clock to send me out.  Fathers just stiffen girls’ backbones instead of encouraging wet eyelashes—­at least that is the way mine affects me.

No, I didn’t sit down and cry when I found out that I wasn’t to have any friends in Byrdsville for the just cause of being too rich, but I stiffened my mind to bear it as a rich man’s daughter ought to bear her father’s mistakes in conduct.