n't
play them. I promised myself to keep from being contaminated with the
wickedness of the city the while I enjoyed its harmless pleasures. The
first horror of the cards soon passed but it left me sobered. I wrote a
long letter to Aunt Maria and then turned off the lights and looked down
into the city street. It seemed wonderful to me to see so many lights
stretched off until some of them were mere specks. There was a wedding
across the street. I saw the guests and caught a glimpse of the bride,
dressed all in white. But later, when Virginia came up to my room and I
asked her about it she didn't know a thing about the wedding. Why, at
home, if there's a big wedding and the neighbors don't know about it or
are not invited to it, they feel slighted. But Virginia says a city is
different, that you don't really have neighbors like in Greenwald.

Virginia told me, too, how she came to teach in our school on the hill.
When she finished college she wanted to earn money, just to prove that
she could. Her father wanted her to stay home and live the life of a
butterfly, she says. One day he said, more in jest than earnest, that if
she insisted upon earning money he'd give his consent to her being a
teacher in a rural school. She accepted the challenge and through her
cousin she secured the place on the hill and became my teacher. When her
father died and her mother became a semi-invalid she gave up her work
and took up the old life again. She said that as if it were not really a
desirable life, this going to teas, dances, plays, musicals, lectures,
and having no cares or worries. Of course I know many of her pleasures
are forbidden fruit for me, but if I ever can wear pretty clothes like
hers and go off to an evening musical or concert I know I'll be as
excited as a Jenny Wren.

CHAPTER XVII

DIARY--THE NEW HOME

_September 16._

I'VE dreamed my first dreams in Philadelphia. Such dreams as they were!
Whatever it was I ate for supper it must have been richer than our
Lancaster County sausage and fried mush, for I dreamed all night. My
old-fashioned walnut bed with its red and green calico quilt seemed to
swing before me while Mother Bab and Aunt Maria talked to me. A clanging
trolley car woke me and I remembered that I had been dreaming of Phares
and the tanager's nest. I slept again and heard the strains of Royal
Lee's violin till another car clanged past and wok