The old dress was the full skirt of fifty years ago, with huge red roses on a white-and-green dotted background, and, as aprons, would have made the snake doctor look like a very young circus. I couldn't stand the thought and cranked my mind as hard as I could for a half minute. The idea came, and it is a good thing to be perfectly straight in the treatment of your friends at all times, so that when a crisis comes they will depend on you. "Roxanne," I said, looking determinedly and sternly into her face with Father's own expression, "have I ever offered you a single thing to eat except when you were company like the other girls, or anything else that would hurt the Byrd pride?" "No, you haven't, Phyllis, and that's why I don't mind telling or letting you see things. You understand that it is for the cause, and I don't have to be afraid that you will hurt--hurt my feelings." I never thought it would be possible for a girl to look at me like Roxanne Byrd looked at me across the pile of ragged little aprons and old dresses. I thank God for it! "Well," I said, "for that dress I want to trade you this blue gingham I have got on to make the aprons out of. It will make three if the tucks are ripped out of the skirt. I want the old flowered skirt to make some cushions for the window seat in the room I sleep in, for it will be just the thing to go with the old mahogany of your grandmother's. It is real old-fashioned chintz and is worth just about ten times as much as this dress I have got on, which you know I bought at Mr. Hadley's, with the other dozen ones that Miss Green is making for me, at twenty-five cents a yard. Will you?" Roxanne doesn't know about that awful spending burden I have had laid on me and she is just as interested in helping me go and buy myself Byrdsville clothes as a friend can be in another's pleasure--not knowing it to be painful responsibility. I locked the box that came from New York with all my spring and summer things in it, in a closet the day it came, and while these things are, of course crude, I like to be in clothes like the other girls. I seem to fit in better. I spent seventy-five dollars at that store by hard effort, and I think won Mr. Hadley's good will for life for both Father and me. Also Miss Green's check was gratifyingly large both to her and me. "Will you trade, Roxanne?" I asked again, keeping the eagerness out of my voice with my father's stern will. "Oh, I don't think I ought." Roxanne hesitated and then said: "Are you sure you don't--that is, are you sure?" "I am," I answered briskly, and in a business like tone. "You can't say that lovely old stuff won't make the very cushions for that very room, Roxanne." "They truly will be lovely, Phyllis, and that gingham will solve the problem for Lovey's whole summer. To-morrow we will--"