She didn't tell him, Mrs. Carney wasn't the telling kind. In a few minutes they begun to talk of other things--Europe and Washington and theaters. And while I stood there, looking at him and looking, it came over me that to be listening there wouldn't be the way Mrs. Carney would act, nor the way he'd meant me to act. So I looked at him once, hard enough to last, the best a look can last, and then I run away up to my room and locked the door. I stood in the middle of the floor and kind of flung myself on to something or somebody in the air, that it seemed to me _must_ have been listening to me. "Make me like I ain't," I says. "Make me different! Make me different--YOU!" When I heard the door shut, I went back down-stairs. I wanted to be the next one to talk to her after he had. She was in the library, putting the books back. And her face was shining like I'd never seen it. "Oh, Cosma," she said, "some people make you feel as if it's a good world!" "It is," I says, "while they're around." "Yes," she says, "it is--while they're around." That was all she said. Pretty soon she went back in the drawing-room, and I followed her so's to be where he had been. I'd been going to sit down in the chair where he had sat, but she sat down there. So I stood by the table. And I was glad it happened that neither of us said anything for quite a while. CHAPTER VIII The school was three great buildings a little way from Mrs. Carney's house. I had never dreamed of anything so grand as those rooms seemed to me. What I couldn't get over was the padded carpets that you didn't make a sound when you walked on. The furniture was big pieces, all carved and hard to dust; and lights that didn't show was burning in the inside rooms. There was great vases, as tall as I, and pictures as big as the ceiling of Mrs. Bingy's and my whole room. The first days at that school are the kind of nightmare that it hurts to remember even in the daytime. I begun by feeling so grand. By the second meal I was wretched. By the time the first evening was half over and the dancing in the gymnasium, I was sick. School wasn't the way I thought it was. If only they'd taken me out and ducked me, or buried me, or left me on the roof all night every night. But the ways they had were like pouring vinegar in a skinned place in my heart. I ain't going to talk about it! And yet I never minded their laughing, if only they looked at me when they laughed. But when they looked at each other and laughed, that killed me.