herself in the mirror. As she lifted the pitcher
from the wash-stand, she happened to glance at the proverb calendar
hanging over the towel-rack, and saw the verse for the day. It was
"Pride goeth before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall."
The big red letters stood out accusingly.

"Oh dear," she thought, as she plunged her burning face into the bowl of
cold water, "if I hadn't had so much miserable pride, I wouldn't have
destroyed what little complexion I had left. Like as not the skin will
all peel off now, and I'll look like a half-scaled fish for weeks."

She was so irritable later, when Joyce exclaimed over her blotched and
mottled appearance, that Mrs. Ware decided she must be coming down with
some kind of rash. It was only to prevent her mother sending for a
doctor, that Mary finally confessed with tears what she had done.

"Why didn't you ask somebody?" said Joyce trying not to let her voice
betray the laughter which was choking her, for Mary showed a grief too
deep to ridicule.

"I--I was ashamed to," she confessed, "and I wanted to surprise you all.
The advertisement said g-grow b-beautiful while you sleep, and now--oh,
it's _spoiled_ me!" she wailed. "And I can't go to the house-party--"

"Yes, you can, goosey," said Joyce, consolingly. "Mamma has Grandma
Ware's old receipt for rose balm, that will soon heal those blisters.
You would have saved yourself a good deal of trouble and suffering if
you had gone to her in the first place."

"Well, don't I know that?" blazed Mary, angrily. Then hiding her face in
her arms she began to sob. "You don't know what it is to be uh-ugly like
me! I heard mamma say that I was as brown as a squaw, and I couldn't
bear to think of Lloyd and Betty and everybody at The Locusts seeing me
that way. _That's_ why I did it!"

"You are not ugly, Mary Ware," insisted Joyce, in a most reproving
big-sisterly voice. "Everybody can't be a raving, tearing beauty, and
anybody with as bright and attractive a little face as yours ought to be
satisfied to let well enough alone."

"That's all right for _you_" replied Mary, bitterly. "But you aren't
fat, with a turned-up nose and just a little thin straight pigtail of
hair. You're pretty, and an artist, and you're going to be somebody some
day. But I'm just plain 'little Mary,' with no talents or _anything_!"

Choking with tears, she rushed out of the room, and took refuge in the
swing down by the beehives. For once the "Sch