than Jimmy and Neale that they were barely aware of her existence. Myrtle, on the contrary, was very much there, a little girl whose comments on things never failed to arouse in Neale the profoundest astonishment. How could anybody think of such dotty things to say? You never had the least idea how anything was going to strike her, except that it was likely to strike her so hard that she made an awful fuss about it.
Myrtle lived in mortal terror of any little dirt, it seemed to Neale. One day in May, when they had had a picnic-lunch out in the back-yard of the Taylors' house, Myrtle carried on perfectly wild about a little flying white thing that had fallen into her glass of lemonade. Holy smoke! thought Neale, if she was afraid to get it out, he wasn't. So he fished it out with a spoon, and handed her back the glass. And what did she do? She made up an awful face and threw the lemonade on the ground! Neale was horrified at the waste.
And the day when Miss Vanderwater in their "natural history lesson" told them about angle-worms and how they keep the ground light and open, didn't Myrtle go off in another fit, with her eyes goggling and her fingers all stretched apart as though she felt angle-worms everywhere. She insisted that Miss Vanderwater must be wrong, that such an awful thing could not be true.
"Why, what do you mean?" asked Miss Vanderwater, for once, Neale noticed with satisfaction, as much at a loss as he.
"Ugh! Nasty!" cried Myrtle. "So all we eat has grown out of what angle-worms have vomited up! And so they're wriggling around, everywhere, touching everything that grows! I never dreamed of such a nasty thing! I'll never eat a radish again! It makes me sick to think of it—to put my mouth where a horrible old angle-worm has been rubbing all its slime off!"
"Now what do you think of that?" Neale asked himself.
Mostly, Myrtle was just the worst dead loss you ever saw; but once in a while you got some good out of her foolishness, like the time when she bit into a lovely-looking apple and
