"Did you give up the gold-piece you found?" he asked. But this puzzled
her.

"'A good name is rather to be chosen than great riches,'" he reminded her.
"Didn't you find a gold-piece like Ben Holt did?"

But it seemed she had never found anything. Indeed, once she had lost a
dime, even on the way to spending it for five candy bananas and five
jaw-breakers. Plainly she had chosen her good name without knowing of the
case of Ben Holt. Then he promised to show her something the most
wonderful in all the world, which she would never believe without seeing
it, and led her to where the candy cane towered to their shoulders in its
corner. He saw at once that it meant less to her than it did to him.

"Oh, it's a candy cane!" she said, _calling_ it a candy cane commonly,
with not even a hush of tone, as one would say "a brick house" or "a gold
watch," or anything. She, promptly detecting his disappointment at her
coldness, tried to simulate the fervour of an initiate, but this may never
be done so as to deceive any one who has truly sensed the occult and
incommunicable virtue of the candy cane. For one thing, she kept repeating
the words "candy cane" baldly, whenever she could find a place for them in
her soulless praise; whereas an initiate would not once have uttered the
term, but would have looked in silence. Another initiate, equally silent
by his side, would have known him to be of the brotherhood. Perhaps at the
end there would have been respectful wonder expressed as to how long it
would stay unbroken and so untasted. Still he was not unkind to her,
except in ways requisite to a mere decent showing forth of his now
ascertained superiority. He helped her to a canter on the new horse; and
even pretended a polite and superficial interest in the doll, Fragile,
which she took up often. Being a girl, she had to be humoured in that