iturn. As
for Pearl, social outlawry may be said to have been her native element.
She had a hazy mind in a lazy body, and liked better than most things
just to sit in a rocking-chair and polish her finger nails, as
distinguished from cleaning them. Only the guiltless member of this
family group really suffered from its low social estate, but she
suffered acutely. Little Susan could not abide being a social outlaw.

True, she was not always included in the general condemnation of her
family by the grown-ups; but the children were ruthless. They pointed
fingers, and there was much conscious giggling behind her back; while
some of the daintier little girls--the very little girls whom Susan
particularly longed to chum with--had been forbidden to play with "that
child," and were not at all averse to telling her so, flatly, with tiny
chins in air and a devastating expression of rectitude on their smug
little faces. At such times Susan would fight back impending cataracts,
stick her own freckled nose toward the firmament, and even, I regret to
say, if persistently harassed, thrust forth a rigid pink tongue. This,
Susan has since informed me, is the embryonic state of "swearing like
anything."

The little boys, on the whole, were better. They often said cruel
things, but Susan felt that they said them in a quite different spirit
from their instinctively snobbish and Grundyish sisters--said them
merely by way of bravado, or just for the fun of seeing whether or not
she would cry. And then they often let her join in their games, and on
those happy occasions treated her quite as an equal, with an impartial
and, to Susan, entirely blissful roughness. Susan early decided that she
liked boys much better than girls.

There was, for example, Jimmy Kane, whose widowed mother took in
washing, and so never had any time to clean up her huddled flat, over
Heinze's grocery store, or her family of four--two boys and two girls.
No one ever saw skin, as in itself it really is, on the faces of Mrs.
Kane's children, and Jimmy was always, if comparison be possible, the
grimiest of the brood. For some reason Jimmy always had a perpetual
slight cold, and his funny flat button of a nose wept, winter and summer
alike, though never into an unnecessary handkerchief. His coat-sleeve
served, even if its ministrations did not add to the tidiness of his
countenance.

Susan often wished she might scrub him, just to see what he really
looked like; for sh