Mrs. Gross, in spite of being a Gentile, seemed like anybody else, so that except for the soft speech, different from the nasal shrill voices of other London Junction women, she had no strange Biblical characteristics. Marcia was puzzled when David declared she too was Gentile, and hastily assured him that she was no such thing, being First Church of Christ and part Welsh and English and Dutch. Later she asked Grandpa about this, and after some reflection he said they might be Gentiles when you got right down to it. He gave her a little dictionary for her birthday so she could look up things. She kept this in the carriage seat in the barn so nobody could take it away, and also her composition books where she wrote down things that nobody, not even Grandpa, would discuss. Mrs. Gross loaned her new novels to let Grandpa read, such as The Calling of Dan Matthews, The Beloved Vagabond, and The Girl from the Limberlost. Sometimes she was so deep in these worlds that she hardly noticed she was still being whipped for not answering when spoken to. Florrie did her crying for her. They didn’t tell the Grosses about their stepmother, because they were ashamed. It would be terrible if people got to feeling sorry for them the way they were for the barefoot poor children who lived in shacks along the railroad. It would be terrible, too, if people wondered why Papa didn’t notice what was going on, but Lena’s theory was that he did but he didn’t know what to do about it, especially since She was good to him at least. After they went to bed, She tiptoed in their room, and while they pretended to be asleep She noiselessly went through all their dresser drawers and took away anything she thought was nonsense, such as Lena’s La Blanche Face Powder and the samples she was always sending away for. She finally found Florrie’s crocheting and took that away, and even after Marcia hid her novels under the mattress She reached under and took them out, so the only way she could get them back was to say they belonged to the church library.

“As if I would still be reading the church library books,” Marcia later exclaimed to her grandfather. “In those books the moral is always that the poor boy can go to heaven quicker than the rich boy, but then the story has the poor boy get a lot richer than the rich boy, so finally there isn’t any moral, except you’d better get rich to be on the safe side.”

“Well, that’s the way books are and you gotta take ’em that way,” Grandpa advised her. “If books was anything like real life nobody’d want to waste time reading ’em.”

Florrie had nightmares from being waked up by creeping hands under her pillow, so she was punished for this. She sometimes walked in her sleep and it made it all the worse for her when she yelled, “Don’t let the witch get me, don’t let her.” She didn’t dare tell Mrs. Gross the crocheting had been taken away, so she said she got tired of it. But secretly she got a piece of twine and a bent hairpin and hid it with Marcia’s notebooks in the carriage seat. She couldn’t resist bringing it in the house one night and hiding it under her pillow. It was going to be a penwiper for Marcia, she promised, when she finished crocheting it. But in the morning it was gone. The next night Florrie cried herself to sleep and then walked, in her sleep, straight into Papa’s bedroom and shouted in an awful voice, “Give me my string and hairpin; I want to crochet. You give it to me or I’ll tell the devil on you.”