can’t call till the woman at least gets her curtains up.”
I pondered this. “Why?” I ventured at last.
“Because she wouldn’t want to see us,” was the reply.
Were curtains, then, so important that one might neither call nor be called on without them? What other possible explanation could there be? Perhaps Mary Elizabeth’s mother had no curtains and that was why our mothers did not know her.
“Mary Elizabeth is going to help do the work for the New Family, and live there,” I said at last. “Won’t it be nice to have her to play with?”
“You must be very kind to her,” somebody said.
“Kind to her!” It was my first horrified look into the depths of the social condescensions. Kind to her—when I remembered what we shared! I thought of saying hotly that she was my best friend. But I was silent. There was, after all, no way to make anybody understand what had opened to me that morning.
