“I’m going to let you stand right up on the platform with the little lady midget—her name’s ‘Pitty Sing’—and show all the other kids how much bigger you are than a grown-up lady. Yessir, she’s a grown-up lady and she’s not nearly as big as you. Now what do you think of that?” Betsy was torn between her love for Sally, whom she was convinced she had found, and her pride in being chosen to stand beside the midget. She looked doubtfully from Sally, whose eyes beneath the black lace veil were lowered to her tightly locked hands, to the platform opposite, where “Pitty Sing,” the midget, was stretching out a tiny hand invitingly. The midget won, for the moment at least. “I’m six, going on seven, and I’m a big girl,” she confided to the barker on whose shoulder she was riding in delightful conspicuousness. The children, true to the herd instinct which had been so highly developed in the orphanage, trooped after Gus and Betsy, even more easily diverted than she from their pop-eyed inspection of “Princess Lalla.” Sally heard Thelma answer another child derisively: “Aw, Betsy’s off her nut! Sure that ain’t Sally! That’s a Turkish princess from Con-stan-ti-no-ple. The man said so. ‘Sides, Sally’s white, and the princess is brown—” “All right, children, right this way!” Gus was ballyhooing loudly. “Permit me to introduce ‘Pitty Sing,’ the smallest and prettiest little woman in the world. Just 29 inches tall, 29 years old and 29 pounds heavy. Did I say ‘heavy’? Excuse me, Pitty Sing! I meant 29 pounds light! Look at her, little ladies and gents! Ain’t she cute? Her parents were just as big as your papas and mamas—” He remembered just too late that he was talking to orphans, and his jolly face went dark red. But he recovered quickly, glanced about his audience, saw that Miss Pond was straying nervously toward Sally’s platform, as if halfway convinced that Betsy’s childish intuition had been correct. “Oh, Miss Pond!” he sang out ingratiatingly. “I wonder if you’d do me the favor to step up on the platform. I believe Betsy is scared. Yessir, I believe she’s scared half out of her skin!” He laughed, stooped to chuck Betsy under the chin, then, with a courtly gesture, offered Miss Pond his hand. Sally looked on, her throat tight with fear and with tears of gratitude toward Gus, as the barker, with a rapid fire of talk and joking, kept his audience completely hypnotized. He jollied shy little Betsy into taking the midget into her arms, like a baby or a big doll, and only Sally, of all those who looked on, could guess how keenly the artificially smiling little atom of humanity was resenting this insult to her dignity.