her's indulgent,
sympathetic heart even though--as Missy believed--she wasn't capable of
"understanding" a daughter's, didn't have it in her, then, to spoil his
pleasure by expounding that wanting furs and wanting beaux were really
one and the same evil.

CHAPTER VII. BUSINESS OF BLUSHING

Missy was embroiled in a catastrophe, a tangle of embarrassments and odd
complications. Aunt Nettie attributed the blame broadly to "that O'Neill
girl"; she asserted that ever since Tess O'Neill had come to live in
Cherryvale Missy had been "up to" just one craziness after another. But
then Aunt Nettie was an old maid--Missy couldn't imagine her as EVER
having been fifteen years old. Mother, who could generally be counted
on for tenderness even when she failed to "understand," rather
unfortunately centred on the wasp detail--why had Missy just stood there
and let it keep stinging her? And Missy felt shy at trying to explain
it was because the wasp was stinging her LEG. Mother would be sure to
remark this sudden show of modesty in one she'd just been scolding for
the lack of it--for riding the pony astride and showing her--

Oh, legs! Missy was in a terrific confusion, as baffled by certain
inconsistencies displayed by her own nature as overwhelmed by her
disgraceful predicament. For she was certainly sincere in her craving
to be as debonairly "athletic" as Tess; yet, during that ghastly moment
when the wasp was...

No, she could never explain it to mother. Old people don't understand.
Not even to father could she have talked it all out, though he had
patted her hand and acted like an angel when he paid for the bucket of
candy--that candy which none of them got even a taste of! That Tess and
Arthur should eat up the candy which her own father paid for, made one
more snarl in the whole inconsistent situation.

It all began with the day Arthur Simpson "dared" Tess to ride her
pony into Picker's grocery store. Before Tess had come to live in the
sanitarium at the edge of town where her father was head doctor, she
had lived in Macon City and had had superior advantages--city life, to
Missy, a Cherryvalian from birth, sounded exotic and intriguing. Then
Tess in her nature was far from ordinary. She was characterized by a
certain dash and fine flair; was inventive, fearless, and possessed the
gift of leadership. Missy, seeing how eagerly the other girls of "the
crowd" caught up Tess's original ideas, felt enormously flattered when
the