First I was so mad I couldn’t cry, and then crying so I couldn’t speak.  But after a while words came, and I said: 

“Pinkie Moore, are you devoted to Miss Bray?  Are you?  I want the truest truth.  Are you devoted to her?”

“Devoted to Miss Bray?  Devoted!” And poor little Pinkie, who has no more spirit than a poor relation, spoke out for once.  “I hate her!” she said.  “I hate her worse than prunes; and if somebody would only adopt me, I’d be so thankful I’d choke for joy, except for leaving you.”  Then she boohoo’d too, and the tears that fell between us looked like we were artesian wells—­they certainly did.

But Pinkie didn’t know what caused my tears.  Mine were mad tears, and not being able to tell her why they came, I had to send her to the house to wash her face.  I washed mine at the pump, and then worked off some of my mad by sweeping the yard as hard as I could, wishing all the time Miss Bray was the leaves, and trying to make believe she was.  I was full of the things the Bible says went into swine, and I knew there would be trouble for me before the day was out.  But there wasn’t.  Not even for breaking the pump-handle was I punished, and Miss Bray tried so hard to be friendly that at first I did not understand.  I do now.

That was my first experience in finding out that some one who looked like a lady on the outside was mean and deceitful on the inside, and it made me tremble all over to find it could be so.  Since then I have never pretended to be friends with Miss Bray.  As for her, she hates me—­hates me because she knows I know what sort of a person she is, a sort I loathe from my heart.

When I first got my diary I thought I was going to write in it every day.  I haven’t, and that shows I’m no better on resolves than I am on keeping step.  I never keep step.  Sometimes I’ve thought I was really something, but I’m not.  Nobody much is when you know them too well.  It is a good thing for your pride when you keep a diary, specially when you are truthful in it.  Each day that you leave out is an evidence of character—­poor character—­for it shows how careless and put-off-y you are; both of which I am.

But it isn’t much in life to be an inmate of a Humane Association, or a Home, or an Asylum, or whatever name you call the place where job-lot charity children live.  And that’s what I am, an Inmate.  Inmates are like malaria and dyspepsia:  something nobody wants and every place has.  Minerva James says they are like veterans—­they die and yet forever live.

Well, anyhow, whenever I used to do wrong, which was pretty constant, I would say to myself it didn’t matter, nobody cared.  And if I let a chance slip to worry Miss Bray I was sorry for it; but that was before I understood her, and before Miss Katherine came.  Since Miss Katherine came I know it’s yourself that matters most, not where you live or where you came from, and I’m thinking a little more of Mary Cary than I used to, though in a different way.  As for Miss Bray, I truly try at times to forget she’s living.