over herself.

"I shall die presently!" she said at first.

Emily stared.

"I can't bear this!" said the poor child, trembling. "I know I shall
die. I'm cold, I'm wet, I'm starving to death. I've walked a thousand
miles to-day, and they have done nothing but scold me from morning until
night. And because I could not find that last thing they sent me for,
they would not give me any supper. Some men laughed at me because my old
shoes made me slip down in the mud. I'm covered with mud now. And they
laughed! Do you _hear_!"

She looked at the staring glass eyes and complacent wax face, and
suddenly a sort of heart-broken rage seized her. She lifted her little
savage hand and knocked Emily off the chair, bursting into a passion of
sobbing.

"You are nothing but a doll!" she cried. "Nothing but a
doll--doll--doll! You care for nothing. You are stuffed with sawdust.
You never had a heart. Nothing could ever make you feel. You are a
_doll_!"

Emily lay upon the floor, with her legs ignominiously doubled up over
her head, and a new flat place on the end of her nose; but she was still
calm, even dignified.

Sara hid her face on her arms and sobbed. Some rats in the wall began to
fight and bite each other, and squeak and scramble. But, as I have
already intimated, Sara was not in the habit of crying. After a while
she stopped, and when she stopped she looked at Emily, who seemed to be
gazing at her around the side of one ankle, and actually with a kind of
glassy-eyed sympathy. Sara bent and picked her up. Remorse overtook her.

"You can't help being a doll," she said, with a resigned sigh, "any more
than those girls downstairs can help not having any sense. We are not
all alike. Perhaps you do your sawdust best."

None of Miss Minchin's young ladies were very remarkable for being
brilliant; they were select, but some of them were very dull, and some
of them were fond of applying themselves to their lessons. Sara, who
snatched her lessons at all sorts of untimely hours from tattered and
discarded books, and who had a hungry craving for everything readable,
was often severe upon them in her small mind. They had books they never
read; she had no books at all. If she had always had something to read,
she would not have been so lonely. She liked romances and history and
poetry; she would read anything. There was a sentimental housemaid in
the establishment who bought the weekly penny papers, and subscribed to
a circulating