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The Voice of the People by Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow
page 47 of 433 (10%)
"You jest let him alone!" cried a voice, and the flutter of a blue
cotton skirt divided Dudley from his adversary. "You jest let him alone.
If you call him common I'll hit you, an'--an' you can't hit me back!"

"Eugie, you ought to be--" began Bernard, but she pushed the combatants
aside with decisive thrusts of her sunburned little hand, and planted
herself upon the threshold, her large, black eyes glowing like shaded
lamps.

"He wan't doin' nothin' to you, and you jest let him be. He's goin' to
tote my books home, an' you shan't touch him. I reckon I know what's
common as well as you do--an' he ain't--he ain't common."

Then she caught Nicholas's arm and marched off like a dispensing
providence with a vassal in tow. Nicholas followed obediently. He was
sufficiently cowed into non-resistance, and he felt a wholesome awe of
his defender, albeit he wished that it had been a boy like himself
instead of a slip of a girl with short skirts and a sunbonnet. At the
bottom of his heart there existed an instinctive contempt of the sex
which Eugenia represented, developed by the fact that it was not force
but weakness that had vanquished his victorious opponent. Dudley Webb
was a gentleman, and only a bully would strike a girl, even if she were
a spitfire--the term by which he characterised Eugenia. He remembered
suddenly her exultant, "an' you can't hit me back!" and it seemed to him
that, even in the righteous cause of his deliverance, she had taken an
unfair and feminine advantage of the handsome boy for whom he cherished
a shrinking admiration.

As for Eugenia herself, she was troubled by no such misgivings. She
walked slightly in front of him, her blue skirt swinging briskly from
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