It was a sort of miracle that Dick Haselridge was not spoiled. Her mother, John Bagsbury’s sister Martha, remembering her own dismal childhood, had gone far in the other direction, and Dick had never known enough repression or discipline at home to be worth mentioning. Dick’s real name, let it be said, was her mother’s, Martha, but as her two first boon companions had borne the names Thomas and Henry, her father, so Dick said, had declared that it was too bad to spoil the combination just because she happened to be a girl, so almost from her babyhood she was known as Dick. It was not wonderful that Dick’s father and mother allowed her to do about as she pleased, for her manner made it hard to deny her anything. Long before she was ten years old, she had made the discovery that anybody, friend or stranger, was very likely to do what she wanted him to. That was a dangerous bit of knowledge for a child to have, and it might have been disastrous to Dick had there not been strong counteracting influences at work. Her father died when she was but twelve years old, and thereby it came about that for the first time in her merry little life Dick tasted the sorrows and the joys of responsibility. Her mother, in the few years of life that were left her, never entirely recovered, so Dick stayed at home to keep her cheerful, and avert the little worries that came to disturb her. Dick was just seventeen when her mother died, and she found herself without a home and without a single intimate friend. For a time she was bewildered by her grief, but her courage and her indomitable buoyancy asserted themselves, and she took the tiller of her life in hand, to steer as good a course as she could without the advice or assistance of anybody. Ever since the death of Victor Haselridge, John Bagsbury had kept a sort of track of his sister, and when she died, he wrote Dick a letter, asking her to come and live with him and Alice; but Dick had determined, first of all, to go to college, so she declined the invitation. She had not been what one would call a studious child, but she was keenly interested in things, and she learned easily, and she had contrived in one way or another to pick up enough information to satisfy the entrance requirement of the college she had chosen. It was a wise decision, for in college she was busy, she was popular, and that, as it did not turn her head, was good for her, and best of all, she found a few intimate friends.