she told me; usually when Billy and I ask questions you would think the whole family had been struck dumb.  But this time she answered and I remember every word—­for if ever anything sounded like a description of Billy and me it was what Grandma Evarts said that day.  I told her so, too; but, of course, she only looked at me over her spectacles and didn’t understand what I meant.  Nobody ever does except Billy and Aunt Elizabeth, and they’re not much comfort.  Billy is always so busy getting into trouble and having me get him out of it, and feeling sorry for himself, that he hasn’t time to sympathize with me.  Besides, as I’ve said before, he’s only a boy, and you know what boys are and how they lack the delicate feelings girls have, and how their minds never work when you want them to.  As for Aunt Elizabeth, she is lovely sometimes, and the way she remembers things that happened when she was young is simply wonderful.  She knows how girls feel, too, and how they suffer when they are like Dr. Denbigh says I am—­very nervous and sensitive and high-strung.  But she admitted to me to-day that she had never before really made up her mind whether I am the “sweet, unsophisticated child” she calls me, or what Tom Price says I am, The Eastridge Animated and Undaunted Daily Bugle and Clarion Call.  He calls me that because I know so much about what is going on; and he says if Mr. Temple could get me on his paper as a regular contributor there wouldn’t be a domestic hearth-stone left in Eastridge.  He says the things I drop will break every last one of them, anyhow, beginning with the one at home.  That’s the way he talks, and though I don’t always know exactly what he means I can tell by his expression that it is not very complimentary.

Aunt Elizabeth is different from the others, and she and I have inspiring conversations sometimes—­serious ones, you know, about life and responsibility and careers; and then, at other times, just when I’m revealing my young heart to her the way girls do in books, she gets absent-minded or laughs at me, or stares and says, “You extraordinary infant,” and changes the subject.  At first it used to hurt me dreadfully, but now I’m beginning to think she does it when she can’t answer my questions.  I’ve asked her lots and lots of things that have made her sit up and gasp, I can tell you, and I have more all ready as soon as I get the chance.

There is another thing I will mention while I think of it.  Grandma Evarts is always talking about “rules of life,” but the only rule of life I’m perfectly sure I have is to always mention things when I think of them.  Even that doesn’t please the family, though, because sometimes I mention things they thought I didn’t know, and then they are annoyed and cross instead of learning a lesson by it and realizing how silly it is to try to keep secrets from me.  If they’d tell me, and put me on my honor, I could keep their old secrets as well as anybody.  I’ve kept Billy’s