you have never offered or asked us to do anything we
ought not to, and if you can think with us I know it will help,"
Roxanne said, looking up at me trustfully.

Again I make record, Louise, that my course with the Byrd family pride
has conquered it, even if I did display symptoms of it myself by
staying away from the cottage so long. I'm in a very queer position. I
have not made everybody understand that I can't be a Girl Scout and I
am a dishonored person in Byrdsville, with all sorts of distinctions
offered me. But this scheme I have thought up to get the doctor here
has made me hold my breath so that I can hardly write, and I can't
worry over honors and medals and things. I will do it! I will!
Good-night!

CHAPTER X

Some people are so afflicted with energy that their days are
twenty-five and a half hours long. Mine are twenty-six just now. If it
were not for the fact that several hours each day I am under the
influence of Roxanne's repose, I suspect I would run down like a clock
that has exhausted its mainspring. Mamie Sue says that Belle says
Roxanne is shiftless, but Belle is unable to distinguish shiftlessness
from noble composure under difficulties. I told Mamie Sue that it
would be best for her to forget all that Belle has ever said to her;
and she is trying.

Still, though I understand it perfectly, it is positively queer to
hear Roxanne talk about what the great doctor is going to do for
Lovelace Peyton's eyes, and they haven't done one thing about getting
him here from Cincinnati. The Idol has gone back to the obscurity of
the shed, and I suppose he is making up some plan about the doctor,
while he is working with his furnaces and retorts and things, but he
hasn't told one yet, and it is two whole days. I do hope and pray that
my plan will succeed without his having to bother with a common thing
like money.

I have had to go to school these two days and then I have to study
medicine with Lovelace Peyton almost all of every afternoon, so I
haven't much time; but I think by to-morrow night I will have told
about a thousand dollars' worth of things about my father and I can
send it all off to Cousin Gilmore Lewis. The time the butler in our
North Shore cottage, summer before last, told the newspapers so many
things about the way Father and his family lived, he got three hundred
dollars for it; so it does seem that if his own daughter told almost a
whole small book about Father it would be worth