Josephine Dodge Daskam

“ You can make up your lies by yourself after this—you and your old Edward."
Ben will turn round that way with her oldest friends. She doesn't seem to care for you at all, if you make her mad. You always feel the worst yourself.
But for once in her life Eleanor Northrop stopped a scrap.
"Oh, girls," she said, "don't quarrel the day I made my vow! I want everybody to be friends. Besides I want you for witnesses." She looked so solemn and of course I saw how she felt. So we made it up.
Only we didn't see how she could help wearing her dress except Sundays. ”

“ She said it was as good as a book, and that is very high praise from Ben.
But Miss Demarest never came near her, after all. Miss Naldreth came in and talked to her and Eleanor wouldn't eat any dinner, and Miss Naldreth asked her if she'd like to go and stay all night with Mrs. Newcomb—that's a friend of her mother's, and they always have rusk for breakfast. And Eleanor's head really ached and she said yes, and she said she cried, too. But Miss Naldreth never asked her a thing. And Eleanor is sure she noticed Edward's picture, too. But that's the way she is. ”

“ So all through dinner we all looked at her and the girls wondered how it happened, and Eleanor was as big as you please.
On Sunday we looked at Edward all the morning and he smiled at Eleanor and she blushed. It was the first time she ever blushed in church and she wrote it in her date-book, she told Ben. Ben said it would prob'ly not be the last.
In the afternoon Pinky West asked me if it was true that somebody had come to Elm City to see Eleanor and gone into the choir because it was her church. Pinky and the other O. L. L. girls are all Congregationalists. ”

“ Of course all was over as I said, because though he wasn't dead, he might as well have been. You cannot love anyone that mends the bath-tub like that, very well. And think of the putty.
Eleanor was going to give up her church, and go with Mrs. Newcomb after that to the Presbyterian, for she said she could never enter St. Mark's again. But afterward she told us that she couldn't bear a black gown without any surplice, so she had to get used to going with us. But she asked if she couldn't sit in the back, and her mother let her give the blue dress away. ”

“ She said that if you acted as if you knew and just wanted to see if they did, they would get talking and finally they'd tell you all about it. She has found out a number of very interesting things in this way from older people. ”

“ Then Eleanor framed the picture in her best birch-bark frame and all the girls saw it. They came in on purpose. He was much too old for Eleanor, with quite a large mustache, but nobody thought of that. We all thought he was quite handsome, but Ben said he looked like the pictures in the backs of magazines of men that had never known a well day till they took a bottle of Dr. Somebody's something or other. ”