Phyllis | Page 8

Roxanne didn't eat I suffered. One of the most awful
situations in life is to have one of your friends be the sort of girl that
has a town named after her and wonderful family portraits and such
dainty hands and feet that shabby shoes don't even count, and then to
know that she is hungry most of the time from being too poor to get
enough food. For two days I have had to keep my mind off Roxanne
Byrd to make myself swallow one single morsel of anything to eat. I
suspected it at the school lunch but I was certain of it from the way
Lovelace Peyton consumed the first cooky I offered him over the fence.
Thank goodness, he has no family pride located in his stomach, and
when my feelings overcome me he is the outlet. I can feed him
anything at all hours and he is always ready for more. It may be wrong
to keep it from his sister when I know how she feels about it, but I can't
help that. I have to fill him up. His legs look too empty for me.
But, to do Lovelace Peyton justice, he has got his own kind of pride,
and I understand it better than I do Roxanne's.
"For these nice eatings, I'll cut a cat open for nothing and let you see
inside what makes him go, if you get the cat," he offered, after he had
eaten two slices of buttered bread and the breast of half a chicken out
behind one of the lilac bushes in his ancestral garden that is now mine.
Now, I call that a fair proposition, considering the circumstances, and I
wish I could make Roxanne be as sensible in spirit. But I can't. Family
pride is a terrible thing, like lunacy or hysterics when a person gets it
bad.

However, I decided to talk to Roxanne about her financial situation,
and I began as far off from the subject as I could, so as to approach it
with caution.
I made a start with a compliment. A sincere compliment is a good way
to start being disagreeable to a person for her own benefit.
"Roxanne," I said, with decided palpitation in my heart that I kept out
of my voice, "you didn't know, did you, that you are one
fifteen-year-old wonder, done up in a feminine edition with curls and
dark eyes? How do you manage it all?"
"I'm not, and I don't," answered Roxanne with a laugh as she drew a
long needle across a mammoth darn she was making on the knee of a
stocking which was quite as small as the darn was large. "I don't
manage at all; everybody will tell you so. Miss Prissy Talbot says she
can't get to sleep at night until twelve o'clock because she has to pray
about so many things that might happen to us poor forlorns if she didn't.
I am mighty thankful to her, for I don't have time to pray much. I am so
tired when I go to bed. I just say 'God, you know,' and go to sleep. He
understands, 'cause Miss Prissy has told him all about it beforehand."
"I just guess He does--without Miss Talbot's telling Him either," I
answered as I came and sat on the front steps beside Roxanne. "And
another thing, Roxanne--I--er, I don't quite know how to say it--but
you--you talk like you are--that is, you seem to be friends with God just
like you are with Tony Luttrell and Belle and Miss Prissy and the
Colonel--and me," I continued with embarrassment.
"I am," answered Roxanne, with beautiful positiveness. "I decided to
have Him for one of my friends 'most two years ago after Father and
Mother died almost together. When Douglass told me that we would
have to sell Byrd Mansion and move down here in this old cottage that
had been great-grandfather's gardener's house, with only Uncle Pompey
to help me take care of it and him and Lovelace Peyton, he asked me if
I couldn't stand by. I held my head up just as high as great-grandmother
Byrd does in her portrait and said: 'Yes!' 'Then God help you,' he said,
and he hugged me up under his chin. Then we all moved; and God has

helped."
"He must have," I answered devoutly, meaning what I said. And as I
spoke something in me was loosened and I felt a wonderful difference
about God. The God that a governess explains out of a book to you and
the One that really comes down and helps a girl friend so that she can
speak of Him with confidence as a friend, are two distinct people. I am
going to feel about Him as Roxanne