On her first morning at school, she seated herself at her desk and looked forth from the golden cloud of her curls, her eyes full of innocent contemplation, her mouth corners gravely drooping.  She knew one little girl who sat not far from her.  The little girl’s name was Floretta Vining.  Floretta was built on the scale of a fairy, with tiny, fine, waxen features, a little tossing mane of flaxen hair, eyes a most lovely and perfect blue, with no more depth in them than in the blue of china, and an expression of the sweetest and most innocent inanity and irresponsibility.  Nobody ever expected anything of this little Floretta Vining.  She was always a negative success.  She smiled around from the foot of her curving class, and never had her lessons, but she never disobeyed the rules, except that of punctuality.

Floretta was late at school.  She came daintily up the aisle, two cheap bangles on one wrist slipping over a slim hand, and tinkling.  Floretta’s mother had a taste for the cheaply decorative.  There was an abundance of coarse lace on Floretta’s frock, and she wore a superfluous sash which was not too fresh.  Floretta toed out excessively, her slender little feet pointing out sharply, almost at right angles with each other, and Ellen admired her for that.  She watched her coming, planting each foot as carefully and precisely as a bird, her lace frills flouncing up and down, her bangles jingling, and thought how very pretty she was.

Ellen felt herself very loving towards the teacher and Floretta Vining.  Floretta leaned forward as soon as she was seated and gazed at her with astonishment, and that deepening of amiability and general sweetness which one can imagine in the face of a doll after persistent scrutiny.  Ellen smiled decorously, for she was not sure how much smiling was permissible in school.  When she smiled guardedly at Floretta, she was conscious of another face regarding her, twisted slightly over a shabby little shoulder covered with an ignominious blue stuff, spotted and faded.  This little girl’s wisp of brown braid was tied with a shoe-string, and she looked poorer than any other child in the school, but she had an honest light in her eyes, and Ellen considered her to be rather more beautiful than Floretta.

She was Maria Atkins, Joseph Atkins’s second child.  Ellen sat with her book before her, and the strange, new atmosphere of the school-room stole over her senses.  It was not altogether pleasant, although it was considered that the ventilation was after the most approved modern system.  She perceived a strong odor of peppermints, and Floretta Vining was waving ostentatiously a coarse little pocket-handkerchief scented with New-mown Hay.  There was also a strong effusion of stale dinners and storm-beaten woollen garments, but there was, after all, that savor of festivity which Ellen was apt to discover in the new.  She looked over her book with utter content.  In a line with her, on the boys’ side, there appeared a covertly peeping face under a thatch of light hair, and Ellen, influenced insensibly by the boy’s shyly worshipful eyes, looked and saw Granville Joy.  She remembered the Christmas top, and blushed very pink without knowing why, and flirted all her curls towards the boys’ side.