"I've just told you, I don't know, but I'm going to do better."

"Well--there was once a girl, whose father had died when she was a baby
and who lived with her mother and a maid in a tiny flat in New York City.
It was a pretty little flat, and they had plenty to eat and to wear, and
a good many pleasant friends and acquaintances; but they didn't have much
money--that is, compared to the other people they knew. This girl went to
a school where all her mates had ten times as much spending money as she
did, who possessed hundreds of things which she coveted, and who were
constantly showering favors upon her which she had no way of returning.
So, from the earliest time that she could remember, she felt discontented
and dissatisfied, and regarded herself as having been picked out by
Providence for unusual misfortunes; and her mother agreed with her.

"I fancy it is never very pleasant to be poor. But if one can be frankly
poor, in calico and overalls, the way you've been, I don't believe it's
quite so hard as it is to be poor and try 'to keep up appearances'; as
the saying is. This girl learned very early the meaning of that
convenient phrase. She gave parties, and went without proper food for a
week afterwards; she had pretty dresses to wear to dances, and wore
shabby finery about the house; she bought theatre tickets and candy, but
never had a cent to give to charity; she usually stayed in the sweltering
city all summer, because there was not enough money to go away for the
summer, and still have some left for the next winter's season; and she
spent two years at miserable little second-rate 'pensions' in
Europe--that pet economy of fashionable Americans who would not for one
moment, in their own country, put up with the bad food, and the
unsanitary quarters, and the vulgar associates which they endure there.

"Before she was sixteen years old this girl began to be 'attractive to