them--but I
just wish every time Roxanne Byrd smiles at me that I didn't have to
make myself stop and remember that she does it because she has to.

"But I believe Phyllis is a nice girl," Mamie Sue said. Mamie Sue
reminds me of a nice, fat molasses drop, with her yellow hair and
always a brown dress on.

"The city is an awful wicked place, Mamie Sue, even if it is only just
a hundred miles away. Let's don't think about the poor thing." Belle
answered positively, and they went out of the door.

I wanted to sit down and cry as I feel sure any girl has a right to
do; only I never have learned how to do it. Crying with only a
governess to listen to and reprove a person is no good at all; only
mothers can make crying any comfort, and mine is too feeble to let me
do anything but tiptoe in and hold her hand while the nurse watches me
and the clock to send me out. Fathers just stiffen girls' backbones
instead of encouraging wet eyelashes--at least that is the way mine
affects me.

No, I didn't sit down and cry when I found out that I wasn't to have
any friends in Byrdsville for the just cause of being too rich, but I
stiffened my mind to bear it as a rich man's daughter ought to bear
her father's mistakes in conduct.

What made me know that the girls had the right view of the question
was what I had found out about it for myself this spring from reading
magazines, and I have been distressed and uneasy about Father ever
since. His own cousin, Gilmore Lewis, who is a fine man, as everybody
knows and as is often published, runs one of the greatest weekly
magazines in New York, and he put a piece in it that would have proved
to a child in the second reader how wicked it is to be millionaire
men. Father's name was not mentioned, but many of his friends' were,
and of course I knew that it was just courtesy of his Cousin Gilmore
to leave it out.

I know it is all wrong, with so many poor people and starvation at
every hand. I see that! But in spite of his terrible habit of making
money I love and trust my father and expect to keep on doing it. He
understands me as well as a man can understand a girl, and he is
regardful for me always. He looked at me for a long time one night a
week before he moved down here in this Harpeth Valley, where the air
is to keep Mother a little longer for us to know she's here even if we
can't always see her every day, and then he said:

"Phil, old girl, I'm not going to take Miss Rogers with us