other, too. He's real nice looking, 'Jack
doffer' says, even if he is lame."

Amy's cheek burned, and her quick temper got her into trouble.

"My brother Hallam is a very, very handsome boy. Even with his lameness
he's a thousand times better looking than any boy in this mill, and
what's more, he's a _gentleman_!"

Then this champion of the aristocracy, which she thought she disdained
but now discovered she was proud to call her own class, walked off with
her nose in the air and her dark eyes glittering with an angry light.

"There, now you've done it!" cried Gwendolyn, in amazement. "But ma said
it wouldn't last. She says that's the way with all the heroines in her
novels that lose their money and pretend to be just plain folks
afterward. They never are. They're always 'ristocratics an' they can't
help it."

"Oh, well, they shouldn't try," remarked this young "heroine," fiercely.
"I don't care at all what they say about me, but they'd best let my Hal
alone."

"Hoity-toity, I don't see as he's any better than anybody else."

Amy stopped short on the path from the mill to the ladder upon the
bluff. Suddenly she reflected how her mother would have regarded her
present mood. "He that ruleth his own spirit."

The words seemed whispered in her ear. A moment later she turned and
spoke again, but her voice was now gentle and appealing.

"Yes, he is better, though I'm not. He is better because he is just what
he seems. There is no pretence about him. He doesn't think that
plastering his hair with stuff, and wearing ugly, showy clothes, and a
hat on the back of his head, or swaggering, or smoking nasty cigarettes,
or being insolent to women, are marks of a gentleman. He's the real
thing. That's what Hal is, and that's why I'm so proud of him, so--so
touchy about him."

"Amy, what does make a gentleman, anyway, if it isn't dressing in style
and knowing things?"

"It's the simplest thing in the world; it's just being kind out of
one's heart instead of one's head. It's being just as pure-minded and
honest as one can be, and--believing that everybody else is as good or a
little better than one's self. So it seems to me."

"We _are_ different, then. I never should know how to say such things. I
don't know how to think them. It isn't any use. You are you, and I am
me, and that ends it."

Amy did not even smile at the crooked grammar. This was the old cry of
Mary, too, and it hurt her.

"Oh, Gwen, I am so sorry. It _i