Now she could not press her face under her mother's arm and escape from the world. Now she was older, much older, almost an adult, and she had to stand on her own feet and not be afraid of other girls. She had always been afraid of other girls. In the day school she went to in New York she had long intimate conversations with them all in her imagination, but never in reality. During recess she sat in a corner and drank her chocolate milk through a straw and read a book, and whenever they had to choose partners for anything she was always paired off with Betty Buck, the other unpopular girl. And on Tuesdays and Thursdays when they had gym in the afternoon, whenever they chose teams Flip was always the last one chosen; Betty Buck could run fast so she was always chosen early. Flip couldn't run fast. She had a stiff knee from the bad time when her knee cap had been broken, so it wasn't entirely her fault, but that didn't make it any easier. However, in New York, Flip didn't mind too much about school. She usually finished her homework in her free period so when she got home the rest of the day was hers. If her father was painting in his studio she would sit and watch him, munching one of the apples he always kept in a big bowl on the table with his jars of brushes. Sometimes she cleaned his brushes for him and put them back carefully in the right jars, the blue ginger jar, the huge green pickle jar, the two brass vases he had brought from China. Flip loved to watch him paint. He painted all sorts of things. He painted a great many children's portraits. He had painted literally dozens of portraits of Flip and one of them was in the Metropolitan Museum of Art and people had bought some of the others. It always seemed strange to Flip that people should want a picture of someone else's child in their homes. Sometimes Philip Hunter did illustrations for children's books and Flip had all of these books in her bookshelves; it seemed that she could never outgrow them. They were in the place of honor and whenever she was sick in bed or unhappy she would take them out and look at them. The book he was doing illustrations for now was one which he said was going to be very beautiful and important, and it was a history of lost children all through the ages. There would be pictures of the lost children in the children's crusade and the lost children in the southern states after the civil war and in Russia after the revolution, and now he was going to travel all around drawing pictures of lost children all over Europe and Asia and he told Flip that he hoped maybe the book would help people to realize that all these children had to be found and taken care of.