Someday you'll remember what I said and you'll thank me for it." Francie wished adults would stop telling her that. Already the load of thanks in the future was weighing her down. She figured she'd have to spend the best years of her womanhood hunting up people to tell them that they were right and to thank them.

It was a good thing that she got herself into this other school. It showed her that there were other worlds beside the world she had been born into and that these other worlds were not unattainable.

Well' Francie decided, 'I guess the thing that is giving me this headache is life - and nothing else but'.

It doesn't take long to write things of which you know nothing. When you write of actual things, it takes longer, because you have to live them first.

Francie looked at her legs. They were long, slender, and exquisitely molded. She wore the sheerest of flawless silk stockings, and expensively made high-heeled pumps shod her beautifully arched feet. "Beautiful legs, then, is the secret of being a mistriss," concluded Francie. She looked down at her own long thin legs. "I'll never make it, I guess." Sighing , she resigned herself to a sinless life.

Those were the Rommely women: Mary, the mother, Evy, Sissy, and Katie, her daughters, and Francie, who would grow up to be a Rommely woman even though her name was Nolan. They were all slender, frail creatures with wondering eyes and soft fluttery voices. But they were made out of thin invisible steel.

But this tree in the yard-this tree that men chopped down...this tree that they built a bonfire around, trying to burn up it's stump-this tree lived! It lived! And nothing could destroy it.