“If you’ll give me a bottle, I’ll give you one mouth-kiss, Phyllis; but for cake and bottles too, I can maybe make it two,” is the way he bargains with me.  Fifteen years is a long time to starve for a little brother to love, so Lovelace Peyton almost always gets both the cake and bottles.

But his fat has begun to burst out of all the clothes he has and somebody has got to get him new ones.  Roxanne and I were managing it when Mr. Douglass interrupted us this morning; and I’m glad a man is so much stupider than a woman or maybe his feelings would have got hurt and I’d have had to argue him into my plan like I did Roxanne.  I feel sure I would have failed with him.  He is the first Idol I ever had and I am new at managing either friends or idols.  However, I have got so I can get the best of Roxanne when it is urgently necessary.

“It’s the funniest thing to me, Phyllis,” Roxanne said the other afternoon, as I went over to see her about my rhetoric lesson, “but rich as you are, I don’t at all mind your seeing my scrimps like I do the other girls, even Mamie Sue.  You are like finding a grandmother’s thimble that fits you exactly and is pure gold.”

Oh, I wish I could learn to be gracious and say lovely things like Roxanne, but I’m just a corked bottle and I can’t get the stopper out.

“What are you doing?” I asked her instead of giving her a squeeze and saying, “You are the dearest thing on earth to me, Roxanne,” which was what I really felt.

“I’m sitting here before this old dress I found in the trunk in the attic and trying to think how I could make Lovey wear the flowered aprons I can make out of it.  I almost know he won’t, for he has begun to say what ‘looks boy’ and what ‘looks girl.’  I did hope I could keep him ignorant of the difference this summer at least.  Would you ask him before you make the aprons or trust to his not noticing?”

The old dress was the full skirt of fifty years ago, with huge red roses on a white-and-green dotted background, and, as aprons, would have made the snake doctor look like a very young circus.  I couldn’t stand the thought and cranked my mind as hard as I could for a half minute.  The idea came, and it is a good thing to be perfectly straight in the treatment of your friends at all times, so that when a crisis comes they will depend on you.

“Roxanne,” I said, looking determinedly and sternly into her face with Father’s own expression, “have I ever offered you a single thing to eat except when you were company like the other girls, or anything else that would hurt the Byrd pride?”

“No, you haven’t, Phyllis, and that’s why I don’t mind telling or letting you see things.  You understand that it is for the cause, and I don’t have to be afraid that you will hurt—­hurt my feelings.”

I never thought it would be possible for a girl to look at me like Roxanne Byrd looked at me across the pile of ragged little aprons and old dresses.  I thank God for it!