Phyllis | Page 2

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 heart to forgive me for taking her home, and asking God to make her love the cottage as I would like to be let to love her. To think that I have to sleep in her great-grandmother's four-poster bed that Roxanne has always slept in! I have to pray hard to be