CHAPTER II


Changing a lifelong principle is almost as difficult as wearing new
shoes that don't exactly fit you, and it makes you feel just as
awkward and limp in mind as the shoes do in feet. Still I believe in
adopting new ideas. I have never liked the appearance of boys, and I
never supposed that when you knew one it would be a pleasant
experience; but in the case of Tony Luttrell it is, and in the case of
Pink Chadwell it is almost so.

I don't know what Roxanne said to them all to explain her relations of
friendship with the heathen--myself--but it was funny to see how they
tried to please her by seeming to like me, only Tony didn't _seem_. He
offered me himself as a friend along with all the bites I cared to
take off the other side of a huge apple he was eating. I took the
bites and Tony at the same time with fear and trembling, but my
confidence in him grows every day. It grows in Pink, also, only much
more slowly.

Tony is long-legged and colty looking, with such a wide mouth and
laughing kind of eyes that the corners of your own mouth go up when
you look at him, and he raises a giggle in your inside by just a funny
kind of flare his eyes have got; but Pink Chadwell is different. Poor
Pink is so handsome that he is pitiful about it. He carries a bottle
of water in his pocket to keep the curl of his front hair sopped out,
but he can't keep his lovely skin from having those pink cheeks. Tony
calls him "Rosebud" when he sees that he has got used to hearing