Always at the end of the six months with the Manleys, Pearl was nearly a nervous wreck. She was behind in her lessons, since there was not a quiet spot in the house to study, and even if there had been you couldn’t escape from the noise of the trombone, which Aunt Carry’s oldest was learning to play; she was underweight and anæemic for lack of regular food and enough sleep ... it wasn’t much use to go to bed when nobody else did, and Aunt Pearl and Aunt Carry always visited in more than audible voices as they put up their hair in curlers; she had nothing to wear (since nothing had been renewed or mended) except a blue silk dress which Grandfather Manley had bought for her in a fit of affection, and some mostly-lace underwear which Aunt Carry had sat up till all hours making for her, so that “she should have something pretty like the other girls!” But for an active little girl, mostly-lace underwear soon was reduced to the quality of mosquito netting; and a blue silk dress in the Manley’s house was first cousin to Sir Walter Raleigh’s cloak in the mud-puddle. With all the family she had been night after night to the moving pictures and not infrequently was kept up afterwards by the hysterics of little Nelly, Aunt Carry’s nervous, high-strung five-year-old, who saw men with revolvers pointed at her, and desperadoes about to bind and gag her, till Pearl more than half saw them too, and dreamed of them afterwards. She had suffered the terrible humiliation of having the teacher send her home with a note saying that her hair must be washed and kept in better order, a humiliation scarcely lessened by the outraged affection of the Manleys, who had taken her into their loving arms, to moan over their darling’s hurt feelings. She had thereafter made frantic efforts to keep her own hair in order, with what brush and comb she could salvage out of the jetsam in the room which was at once hers and the aunts’ bedroom; but if she complained that her hair-ribbons disappeared, or were crumpled in a corner of the drawer, she was told comfortably, not to be fussy, “For goodness’ sakes, don’t make such a fuss about things! Folks that do never have a minute’s comfort in life, nor nobody else in the house either.”