scented
leaves was sweeter still, and made my heart and face glow. When we were
getting our wraps and bonnets in the cloak-room, at the close of the
afternoon session, I edged nearer and nearer to her, pretending to hunt
for my overshoes, meaning to say a word of thanks as soon as the group
about her thinned. I got so near to her that I caught what she was
saying in a low voice to her intimates:--

"I just _hated_ not to invite the Burwells, but they do look so
countryfied! like little old women cut short after they were made. And I
don't believe either of them has a party dress to her name. They would
be a pair of sights in a roomful of well-dressed people."

I slipped away with a barbed arrow in my self-love, and a hard,
resentful pain at my heart, on my mother's account. Fierce tears scalded
the inside of my eyelids as I recalled her weeks of loving preparation
for our school life, the thousand of stitches set by her dear hands,
the gentle smile of satisfaction with which she had surveyed our
finished wardrobe. When I was in my own room at Cousin Molly's, I hugged
and kissed and cried over the slatted hood, vowing vengefully to study
so hard, and to rise so fast in my classes, and to acquit myself so
nobly in the sight of my teachers, as to compel the admiration of the
proud who rose up against me, and who compassed me about like bees.
David's "cussing psalms" came readily and forcibly to my help in the
hour of bitter humiliation.

If my wrath was unhallowed, it wrought the peaceable fruits of
righteousness. The barb had gone too deep to be uncovered even to Cousin
Molly Belle, but the hurt made a student of me. Giving up all thought of
popularity and polish, I devoted myself to my school work with assiduity
that threatened injury to my health before the half-term was over. But
for my best and most clear-sighted of cousins I might have become a
misanthropic invalid.

On the very day of the now hateful party, she took us for a long
drive,--the whole length of Main Street, the sidewalks of which were
thronged with promenaders and shoppers. She stopped the carriage--a
handsome equipage, with a smart coachman and two spanking grays--at
Samanni's and bought us a whole pound, apiece, of delicious candy, and
treated us to Albemarle pippins to take home with us, and ice-cream
eaten on the spot. Next, we went to Drinker and Morris's, the
fashionable bookstore, and she told us to pick out, each for herself,
the books we w