The first day of the arrival at the Manley’s was always a dream of delight! To emerge from the silent rigidity of the Purdon house into the cheerful, easy-going, affectionate noise of the Manley home, to exchange the grim looks of Grandmother Purdon for the exuberant caresses of Grandmother Manley; to leave behind all stringent admonitions to put your wraps on a certain hook, and to be allowed to fling them down on the floor where you stood.... Little Pearl (she was never called Maria by the Manleys) felt herself rebounding into all the sunshine and good-nature, as a rubber ball rebounds from a hard stone wall. She flung herself around Aunt Pearl’s neck, and paid back with interest the “forty thousand kisses” which were the tradition in that home. She flung herself into play with the innumerable little cousins, who cluttered up the floor; for there was always a married aunt or two back home, with her family, while an invisible uncle-by-marriage tried somewhere in a vague distance, to get a hypothetical job. She flung herself into her bed at night joyfully reveling in the fact that its corners were not turned squarely, and that the pillow-case had last seen the wash-tub on about the same date that Aunt Carry’s husband had last had a job. It was a care-free dream to go to bed whenever she pleased--eleven o’clock if that suited her taste--with nobody to tell her to wash, or to brush her teeth, or comb her hair; and to lie there watching Aunt Carry and Aunt Pearl, who always sat up till midnight at least, putting their hair in curl-papers and talking about the way the neighbor next door treated his wife. This was life! But already the very next morning the dream was not quite so iridescent, as with no one to wake her, she opened her eyes at twenty minutes of nine, and knew that she had to be at school at nine! She sprang up, shivering in the cold room (Grandfather Manley never could manage the furnace, and also there were periods when there was mighty little money to buy coal) and started to claw herself into her clothes. But always just at first she forgot the Manley ways, and neglected to collect everything she had taken off, and put it under her pillow, the only spot in which you could keep things for yourself in that comfortably communistic family. Her shoes were gone, her nice new calf-skin school shoes. She went flying out, comb in hand, tearing at the tangles in her hair, as she went, asking if anybody had seen her shoes. Aunt Carry, still in her nightgown, with a smeary baby in her arms, said, yes, she’d let her Elmer have them to run down to the grocery store to get some bread. Somehow they’d got out of bread and poor Aunt Pearl had had to go off to her work with only some crackers to eat. Surely little Pearl didn’t grudge the loan of her shoes to her cousin. The bread was for all of them, and Elmer couldn’t find his shoes, and anyhow one of them had a big hole in it and the snow was deep.