Phyllis | Page 2

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.
What made me know that the girls had the right view of the question
was what I had found out about it for myself this spring from reading
magazines, and I have been distressed and uneasy about Father ever
since. His own cousin, Gilmore Lewis, who is a fine man, as everybody
knows and as is often published, runs one of the greatest weekly
magazines in New York, and he put a piece in it that would have
proved to a child in the second reader how wicked it is to be millionaire
men. Father's name was not mentioned, but many of his friends' were,
and of course I knew that it was just courtesy of his Cousin Gilmore to
leave it out.
I know it is all wrong, with so many poor people and starvation at
every hand. I see that! But in spite of his terrible habit of making
money I love and trust my father and expect to keep on doing it. He
understands me as well as a man can understand a girl, and he is
regardful for me always. He looked at me for a long time one night a
week before he moved down here in this Harpeth Valley, where the air

is to keep Mother a little longer for us to know she's here even if we
can't always see her every day, and then he said:
"Phil, old girl, I'm not going to take Miss Rogers with us to go on with
your solitary brand of education. There is a little one-horse school in
Byrdsville that they call the Byrd Academy, and I watched a bunch of
real human boys and girls go in the gate the morning I got there. I think
you will have to be one of them. I want to see a few hayseeds sprinkled
over your very polished surface."
I laughed with him. That is the good thing about Father: you can
always laugh with him, even if you are not sure what you are laughing
about. Laughing at a person is just as rude as eating an apple right in
his face. Father always divides his apple. Though rich, he is a really
noble man.
But although I didn't cry when I heard Belle talking a course of
righteous action into fat Mamie Sue about me, I made up my mind that
I would have to have some sort of person to talk to, so I bought this
book. I am going to call it "Louise" and do as good a stunt of
pretending that it has got brown hair and blue eyes and a real heart as I
can. All I have written up to now has just been introducing myself to
Louise. Our real adventures and conversations will come later.
Before I have gone to bed all this week I have been taking a peep out of
my window down over the back garden to Roxanne Byrd's cottage and
asking her in my