er a while, and I'm so afraid I will do it before I
travel some that if I were a boy child I'd go anyhow. But I can't go.
That is, not yet.

Miss Katherine has been travelling for two months up North. She's been
with her brother and his wife. The wife is sick, or she thinks she is,
which Miss Katherine says is a hard disease to cure, and she's kept them
moving from place to place.

They wanted Miss Katherine to go to Europe with them this fall, but she
isn't going. She's been twice, and says she don't want to go. But I
don't believe it's that. I believe it's something else.

But sufficient unto the day is the happiness thereof! I'm going to enjoy
her staying, and already everything seems different.

You see, Miss Katherine lives here just for love, and when you do things
for love you do them differently from the way you do them for money.

We are just Charity children, some not knowing who they are, I being one
of that kind; but she never treats us as if she thinks of that. If we
were relations she liked, she couldn't be kinder or nicer, and when a
child is in trouble Miss Katherine is the one that's gone to at once.

She is never too tired or too busy to listen, but she's awful firm; and
there's no nonsense or sullenness or shamming where she is. She can see
through the insides of your soul, up to the top and down to the tip, and
in front of her eyes you are just your plain self. Only that, and
nothing more. They are gray, her eyes are, with a dark rim around the
gray part; and she has the longest black lashes I ever saw. Her hair is
black, too, like an Eastern Princess and in the morning when she puts
her cap on and her nurse's white dress, which she wears when on duty, I
call her to myself, "My Lady of the Lovely Heart," and I could kneel
down and say my prayers to her.

I don't, though, for she would tell me pretty quick to get up. She
doesn't like things like that, and, of course, it would look queer.

But I don't know anybody who isn't queer about something. Either stupid
queer, or silly queer, or smart queer, or beautiful queer, or religious
queer, or selfish queer, or some other kind.

Miss Bray is the Queen of Queers.

But Miss Katherine is queer, too. If she wasn't, she wouldn't stay at
this Orphan Asylum, just to help us children, and doing it as cheerfully
as if she were happier here than she would be anywhere else. If her
staying isn't queerness, beautiful queerness, what is it?

I don't underst