“We’ve got to walk someplace. We can’t fly over it,” Marcia said in a loud enough tone to be considered audacious by Lena, but not loud enough to reach the kitchen.

Grandpa had a crick in his back and took time out for a chew of tobacco.

“If you don’t have any family you’ll just be an old maid,” Lena said crushingly. “How do you think you’ll like that, smarty?”

“I’d like it fine,” Marcia boldly replied, hoping God wouldn’t hear this and take her seriously. “I don’t see any sense in getting married and having a lot of family to be mean to me.”

“You get used to it,” Grandpa said comfortably. “If it ain’t your own family it’s other people’s. Might as well be picked on by your own flesh and blood.”

“Marcia’s going to be an old maid whether she wants to or not,” Lena said complacently. “The boys don’t like her because she’s so crazy.”

This had such a ring of authority that Marcia kept a moody silence. It was a fact that boys sent Lena notes all the time and followed her home from school as far as they dared. The only boy who sent Marcia notes was little David Gross, who was only eleven, small for his age, and called sissy by the class. Even the high school boys and railroad men in the Elks Pool Room whistled at Lena as she passed, but Marcia walked past much slower and oftener with never a whistle. If she had heard one she would have shrieked out her delight, “Oh, thank you, thank you, thank you!” It was Lena’s yellow curls that did the trick, and then her rosy cheeks. Nobody ever liked hair-colored hair, straight at that, like Marcia’s. The future looked very gloomy so far as romance was concerned. Probably there’d be nothing left for her but to be rich and famous. But even famous people, married or no, often ended up with cruel landlords and mean uncles throwing them into institutions, locking them in attics, or putting them on the street. Marcia thought very likely Lena would be the one to turn on her in her hour of need and order her off to a cot in the cellar. Lena was sometimes almost as bad as her stepmother. Lena walked on the other side of the street rather than walk to school with Marcia, and whenever Marcia told her anything Lena exclaimed coldly, “Oh, you’re crazy.” If it was something Marcia had read in a book, Lena said it was just poppycock, because the only persons Lena trusted were Mary Evelyn and Myrtle Chase.

Grandpa was a great reader and discussed books with Marcia. His son’s wife was fit to be tied when She found out he had brought a box of paperbacked novels from the Soldiers’ Home. There was no way She could forbid his lending them to Marcia, however, because She did not dare say all the things she’d like to Grandpa—not yet, anyway. Marcia read countless novels by E. P. Roe, Charlotte Braeme, Bulwer Lytton, Mary J. Holmes, and others, but they left her baffled and angry.