ect them, and want to go again, if I may."

"Oh, Fan, I am so glad! I hoped you 'd like them, I knew they 'd do you
good, and I 'll take you any time, for you stood the test better than
I expected. Becky asked me to bring you again, and she seldom does that
for fashionable young ladies, let me tell you."

"I want to be ever so much better, and I think you and they might show
me how," said Fanny, with a traitorous tremble in her voice.

"We 'll show you the sunny side of poverty and work, and that is a
useful lesson for any one, Miss Mills says," answered Polly, hoping that
Fan would learn how much the poor can teach the rich, and what helpful
friends girls may be to one another.

CHAPTER XIV. NIPPED IN THE BUD

ON the evening of Fan's visit, Polly sat down before her fire with a
resolute and thoughtful aspect. She pulled her hair down, turned her
skirt back, put her feet on the fender, and took Puttel into her lap,
all of which arrangements signified that something very important had
got to be thought over and settled. Polly did not soliloquize aloud,
as heroines on the stage and in books have a way of doing, but the
conversation she held with herself was very much like this: "I 'm afraid
there is something in it. I 've tried to think it 's nothing but vanity
or imagination, yet I can't help seeing a difference, and feeling as if
I ought not to pretend that I don't. I know it 's considered proper for
girls to shut their eyes and let things come to a crisis no matter how
much mischief is done. But I don't think it 's doing as we 'd be done
by, and it seems a great deal more honest to show a man that you don't
love him before he has entirely lost his heart. The girls laughed at me
when I said so, and they declared that it would be a very improper thing
to do, but I 've observed that they don't hesitate to snub 'ineligible
parties,' as they call poor, very young, or unpopular men. It 's all
right then, but when a nice person comes it 's part of the fun to let
him go on to the very end, whether the girls care for him or not. The
more proposals, the more credit. Fan says Trix always asks when she
comes home after the summer excursions, 'How many birds have you
bagged?' as if men were partridges. What wicked creatures we are! some
of us at least. I wonder why such a love of conquest was put into us?
Mother says a great deal of it is owing to bad education nowadays, but
some girls seem born for the express purpose