Calista was a vague little soul, with no sense of facts. She was always promising to walk with two girls at recess, which was equivalent to asking two to be her partners in a quadrille. It simply could not be done. So Calista was forever having to promise to run errands with someone after school to make amends for not having walked with her at recess. She seldom had a grievance of her own, but she easily fell in with the grievances of others. When I presented Mary Elizabeth to her, Calista received her serenely as a part of the course of human events; and so I think she would have continued to regard her, without great attention and certainly with no criticism, had she not received the somewhat powerful suggestion of Delia and Margaret Amelia and Betty Rodman. The three fell behind Mary Elizabeth and me as we trotted down the long street on which the April sun smote with Summer heat. “--over across the railroad tracks and picks up tin cans and old rubbers and sells ’em and drinks just awful and got ten children and got arrested,” I heard Delia recounting. “The idea. To our picnic,” said Margaret Amelia’s thin-edged voice. “Without asking us,” Betty whispered, anxious to think of something of account to say. Mary Elizabeth heard. I have seen that look of dumb, unresentful suffering in many a human face--in the faces of those who, by the Laws of sport or society or of jurisprudence, find no escape. She had no anger, and what she felt must have been long familiar. “I’d better go home,” she said to me briefly. I still had her by the hand. And it was, I am bound to confess, as no errant but chiefly as antagonist to the others that I pulled her along. “You got to come,” I reminded her. “You said you would.” It was cruel treatment, by way of kindness. The others, quickly adapting themselves, fell into the talk of expeditions, which is never quite the same as any other talk; and the only further notice that they took of Mary Elizabeth was painstakingly to leave her out. They never said anything to her, and when she ventured some faint word, they never answered or noticed or seemed to hear. In later years I have had occasion to observe, among the undeveloped, these same traces of tribal antagonisms.