she never disobeyed the rules, except that of
punctuality.

Floretta was late at school. She came daintily up the aisle, two
cheap bangles on one wrist slipping over a slim hand, and tinkling.
Floretta's mother had a taste for the cheaply decorative. There was
an abundance of coarse lace on Floretta's frock, and she wore a
superfluous sash which was not too fresh. Floretta toed out
excessively, her slender little feet pointing out sharply, almost at
right angles with each other, and Ellen admired her for that. She
watched her coming, planting each foot as carefully and precisely as
a bird, her lace frills flouncing up and down, her bangles jingling,
and thought how very pretty she was.

Ellen felt herself very loving towards the teacher and Floretta
Vining. Floretta leaned forward as soon as she was seated and gazed
at her with astonishment, and that deepening of amiability and
general sweetness which one can imagine in the face of a doll after
persistent scrutiny. Ellen smiled decorously, for she was not sure
how much smiling was permissible in school. When she smiled
guardedly at Floretta, she was conscious of another face regarding
her, twisted slightly over a shabby little shoulder covered with an
ignominious blue stuff, spotted and faded. This little girl's wisp
of brown braid was tied with a shoe-string, and she looked poorer
than any other child in the school, but she had an honest light in
her eyes, and Ellen considered her to be rather more beautiful than
Floretta.

She was Maria Atkins, Joseph Atkins's second child. Ellen sat with
her book before her, and the strange, new atmosphere of the
school-room stole over her senses. It was not altogether pleasant,
although it was considered that the ventilation was after the most
approved modern system. She perceived a strong odor of peppermints,
and Floretta Vining was waving ostentatiously a coarse little
pocket-handkerchief scented with New-mown Hay. There was also a
strong effusion of stale dinners and storm-beaten woollen garments,
but there was, after all, that savor of festivity which Ellen was
apt to discover in the new. She looked over her book with utter
content. In a line with her, on the boys' side, there appeared a
covertly peeping face under a thatch of light hair, and Ellen,
influenced insensibly by the boy's shyly worshipful eyes, looked and
saw Granville Joy. She remembered the Christmas top, and blushed
very pink without knowing why, and flirted