“Margaret thought she was ten when she went to live with Magdalene, but she soon learned that it was a mistake and she got to be only seven in less’n half an hour.  Magdalene put shorter dresses on her and kept her in white and gave her shoes without any heels, and these little short socks that show a foot or so of bare leg and which is indecent, if fashionable.

“Margaret’s birthdays kept gettin’ farther and farther apart, and as soon as the neighbours begun to notice that Margaret wasn’t agin’ like everybody else, why, Magdalene would just pack up and go to a new place.

“She didn’t go to school, but had private teachers, because it was in the will that she was to be educated like a real lady.  Any teacher who thought Margaret was too far advanced for her age got fired the minute it was spoke of, and pretty soon Margaret got onto it herself.  She used to tell teachers she liked to say that she was very backward in her studies, and tell those she didn’t like that Aunty Magdalene would be dreadful pleased to hear that she was improvin’ in her readin’ and ’rithmetic and grammar.

“Meanwhile Nature was workin’ in Margaret’s interest and she was growin’ taller and taller every day.  The short socks had to be took off because people laughed so, and Magdalene had to let her braid her hair instead of havin’ it cut Dutch and tied with a ribbon.  When she was eighteen, she thought she was thirteen, and she was wearin’ dresses that come to her shoe tops, and her hair in one braid down her back, and dreadful young hats and no jewels, though her pa had left her a small trunk full of rubies and diamonds and pearls.  Magdalene was wearin’ the jewels herself.  They were movin’ around pretty rapid about this time, and goin’ from city to city in order to find better teachers for ‘the dear child’ as Magdalene used to call her.

[Sidenote:  The Conductor]

“One day, soon after they’d gone to a new city, Margaret was goin’ down town to take her music lesson.  She went alone because Magdalene was laid up with a headache and wanted the house quiet.  When the conductor come along for the fare, Margaret was lookin’ out of the window, and, absent-minded like, she give him a penny instead of a nickel.

“The conductor give it back to her, and asked her if she was so young she could go for half fare, and Margaret says, right sharp, when she give him the nickel, ‘It’s not so long since I was travellin’ on half-fare.’

“The conductor says:  ‘I’d hate to have been hangin’ up by the thumbs since you was,’ says he.  Of course this made Margaret good and mad, and she says to the conductor, ‘How old do you think I am?’

“The conductor says:  ‘I ain’t paid to think durin’ union hours, but I imagine that you ain’t old enough to lie about your age.’

[Sidenote:  Ronald Macdonald]

“Just then an old woman with a green parrot in a big cage fell off the car while she was gettin’ off backwards as usual, and Margaret didn’t have no more chance to fight with the conductor.  She saw, however, that he was terrible good lookin’—­like the dummy in the tailor’s window.  It says in the story that ’Ronald Macdonald’—­that was his name—­was as handsome as a young Greek god and, though lowly in station, he would have adorned a title had it been his.’