in the treatment of your friends at all times, so that when a crisis
comes they will depend on you.

"Roxanne," I said, looking determinedly and sternly into her face with
Father's own expression, "have I ever offered you a single thing to
eat except when you were company like the other girls, or anything
else that would hurt the Byrd pride?"

"No, you haven't, Phyllis, and that's why I don't mind telling or
letting you see things. You understand that it is for the cause, and I
don't have to be afraid that you will hurt--hurt my feelings."

I never thought it would be possible for a girl to look at me like
Roxanne Byrd looked at me across the pile of ragged little aprons and
old dresses. I thank God for it!

"Well," I said, "for that dress I want to trade you this blue gingham
I have got on to make the aprons out of. It will make three if the
tucks are ripped out of the skirt. I want the old flowered skirt to
make some cushions for the window seat in the room I sleep in, for it
will be just the thing to go with the old mahogany of your
grandmother's. It is real old-fashioned chintz and is worth just about
ten times as much as this dress I have got on, which you know I bought
at Mr. Hadley's, with the other dozen ones that Miss Green is making
for me, at twenty-five cents a yard. Will you?"

Roxanne doesn't know about that awful spending burden I have had laid
on me and she is just as interested in helping me go and buy myself
Byrdsville clothes as a friend can be in another's pleasure--not
knowing it to be painful responsibility.