My financial condition was not improved this morning, father having not returned. But I knew that I must see the play, as mentioned above, even if it became necessary to borrow from Hannah. At last, seeing no other way, I tried this, but failed. "What for?" she said, in a suspicious way. "I need it terribly, Hannah," I said. "You'd ought to get it from your mother, then, Miss Barbara. The last time I gave you some you paid it back in postage stamps, and I haven't written a letter since. They're all stuck together now, and a total loss." "Very well," I said, frigidly. "But the next time you break anything----" "How much do you want?" she asked. I took a quick look at her, and I saw at once that she had decided to lend it to me and then run and tell mother, beginning, "I think you'd ought to know, Mrs. Archibald----" "Nothing doing, Hannah," I said, in a most dignified manner. "But I think you are an old clam, and I don't mind saying so." I was now thrown on my own resources, and very bitter. I seemed to have no friends, at a time when I needed them most, when I was, as one may say, "standing with reluctant feet, where the brook and river meet." Tonight I am no longer sick of life, as I was then. My throws of anguish have departed. But I was then utterly reckless, and even considered running away and going on the stage myself. I have long desired a career for myself, anyhow. I have a good mind, and learn easily, and I am not a parasite. The idea of being such has always been repugnant to me, while the idea of a few dollars at a time doled out to one of independent mind is galling. And how is one to remember what one has done with one's allowance, when it is mostly eaten up by small loans, carfare, stamps, church collection, rose water and glycerin, and other mild cosmetics, and the additional food necessary when one is still growing? To resume, Dear Diary; having utterly failed with Hannah, and having shortly after met Sis on the stairs, I said to her, in a sisterly tone, intimate rather than fond: "I daresay you can lend me five dollars for a day or so." "I daresay I can. But I won't," was her cruel reply. "Oh, very well," I said briefly. But I could not refrain from making a grimace at her back, and she saw me in a mirror. "When I think," she said heartlessly, "that that wretched school may be closed for weeks, I could scream." "Well, scream!" I replied. "You'll scream harder if I've brought the measles home on me. And if you're laid up, you can say good-bye to the dishonorable. You've got him tied, maybe," I remarked, "but not thrown as yet." (A remark I had learned from one of the girls, Trudie Mills, who comes from Montana.) I was therefore compelled to dispose of my silver napkin ring from school. Jane was bought up, she said, and I sold it to the cook for fifty cents and half a mince pie although baked with our own materials. All my fate, therefore, hung on a paltry fifty cents.