"They have certain ways of doing everything, and just certain times for doing them, and if you do a wrong thing at a right time, or a right thing at a wrong time, it shows you are from the West. At first, I couldn't say a word, or turn around, without showing that I was from the West. But although I've been from home only a few days, I'm getting so that nobody can tell that I'm more important than the furniture around me. I'm trying to be just like the one I'm with, and I don't believe an outsider can tell that I have any more sense than the rest of them. "Miss Sellimer is so nice to me. I told her right at the start that I didn't know anything about the big world, and she teaches me everything. I'd be more comfortable if she could forget about my saving her life, but she never can, and is so grateful it makes me feel that I'm enjoying all this on false pretenses for you know my finding her was only an accident. Her mother is very pleasant to me--much more so than to her. Bill, you know how you speak to your horse, sometimes, when it acts contrary? That's the way Miss Sellimer speaks to her mother, at times. However, they don't seem very well acquainted with each other. Of course if they'd lived together in a cove for years, they'd have learned to tell each other their thoughts and plans, but out in the big world there isn't time for anything except to dress and go. "I'm learning to dress. I used to think a girl could do that to please herself, but no, the dresses are a thousand times more important than the people inside them. It wouldn't matter how wise you are if your dress is wrong, nor would it matter how foolish, if your dress is like everybody else's. A person could be independent and do as she pleased, but she wouldn't be in society. And nobody would believe she was independent, they would just think she didn't know any better, or was poor. Because, they don't know anything about being independent; they want to be governed by their things. A poor person isn't cut off from society because he hasn't money, but because he doesn't know how to deal with high things, not having practised amongst them. It isn't because society people have lots of money that they stick together, but because all of them know what to do with the little forks and spoons. "It is like the dearest, jolliest kind of game to me, to be with these people, and say just what they say, and like what they like, and act as they act--and that's the difference between me and them; it's not a game to them, it's deadly earnest. They think they're LIVING! "Do you think I could play at this so long that one day I'd imagine I was doing what God had expected of me when he sent me to you, Brick? Could I stay out in the big world until I'd think of the cove as a cramped little pocket in the wilderness with two pennies jingling at the bottom of it named Brick and Bill? If I thought there was any danger of that, I'd start home in the morning!