Page:George Weston--The apple-tree girl.djvu/61

 grow harder the more she tried to crack it.

All that day and the next and the next she thought it over, but still she failed to get an answer.

"Perhaps if I were to start a dancing class," she thought once, for instance, "everybody would like me."

But, in the first place, Charlotte couldn't dance; and, in the second place, there was nowhere in Penfield where a dancing class could be held except in Thayer Hall; and Deacon Thayer didn't believe in dancing, because of what the daughter of Herodias once did, and he wasn't going to have any such doings going on in Thayer Hall. So, you see, that wouldn't do.

"Perhaps if I gave comic recitations, like Bertha Ennis does, and made them all laugh," thought Charlotte another time, "everybody would like me."

But in the first place, Charlotte's wasn't the comic spirit (her childhood at