Then, the wretched lace-curtained window was pushed open, and a woman’s faded face appeared, a vapid, senseless face with dyed blond hair and china-doll blue eyes; a wisp of pink ribbon showed about her drawn throat. “Dear me, Cornelius, don’t stand here all day,” she began fretfully. “Thurley, come right inside and git on some decent duds. I guess folks think, because we’re travellin’ in a wagon, that we ain’t no better than gypsies—well, every one has their high days AND their low ones. If my father could see me now!” Her thin hands loaded with cheap rings lifted into view and twelve-year-old Daniel Birge, counted as the gallows’ brightest prospect, nudged Lorraine McDowell, the only girl he ever played with—because his father made him—until they both laughed. “Of all the bringin’ up!” floated out in thin, melancholy tones. “Cornelius, are you goin’ to set there like a bump on a log and have me laffed at?” But Thurley had jumped down and with clenched fists approached Daniel and Lorraine. She paused, womanlike, to give vent to her opinion before she should strike. Just then Prince Hawkins and his wife and Betsey Pilrig and her lame grandchild, Philena, gathered as spectators. They said afterwards that all the devils in the world seemed flashing from the strange child’s blue eyes. She was barefoot and ragged; her dress far too short for her long-legged, awkward self, and her mop of brown hair in a disorderly braid. But she had a fine, strong body, despite the ragged dress, and, although she possessed not a single regular feature, there was a prophecy of true greatness in her face. Daniel and Lorraine stared at the brown, clenched fists. They were the ordinary, well-dressed, well-nourished children to be seen in such a backwoods town as Birge’s Corners. “Now you laff again,” Thurley commanded. “Laff—go on—let me hear you. I want to tell you I got a sick pa and ma, and we certainly have played hard luck all the way from Boulder, Colorado. I guess, if you had any manners, you’d not laff at us. Not if we do peddle tinware and tell fortunes by tea leaves. We ain’t always done it, and we ain’t always goin’ to. But we’re in hard luck—don’t you understand? And don’t you dare to laff when my ma talks or call us gypsies. We’re white folks, but we’re just a little bit discouraged,” her angry voice betrayed a quiver. The others had gathered nearer to hear what was being said, looking up at the driver’s seat to where the wreck of a man sat smoking his corn-cob pipe, secure in the defense established by his small virago. “I tell you right now,” Thurley’s mother supplemented, “that, when I had my health and was on the stage, I could have bought and sold the whole town. My father was a real Kentucky colonel, and I was brought up to never lift a finger—” At which Thurley’s father took his pipe from his mouth long enough to say, “Shut up, Jen; let the kid give it to ’em—she knows how.”