Page:Leah Reed--Brenda's summer at Rockley.djvu/145

Rh “She is n’t at all a dreary sort of girl,” rejoined Julia. “She seems to have read everything worth reading. I suppose that’s because she has studied at home with her  mother. Next year she’s going to the High School at Salem, she told me.”

“I’d like her very much, more than almost any one I know,” said Brenda, “if she were n’t quite so snubbing. I wish you could have seen how shocked she looked when she found that I admired the novels of ‘The Countess.’  Really I did feel small when she handed back one to me  that I had dropped over there on the rocks.”

“It served you right, Brenda Barlow; those novels are trash, and I believe that you know that they are. Why I don’t profess to read very deep things, but I would n’t  waste my time over ‘The Countess.’ Besides, I thought  that your mother did n’t care to have you do it; has n’t she  forbidden you?”

Brenda flushed a little angrily. “My mother never forbids me to do anything. She says that I must learn the difference between right and wrong myself.”

“Come now, Brenda, she does n’t expect you to choose the wrong, does she?”

Nora could venture farther with Brenda than most of her friends. But this time Brenda was almost offended with her.

“As I told Julia the other day, if my mother wishes, she can make a bonfire of all my novels; there are n’t so very  many of them. They ’re all there in plain sight on my book-shelf. I should n’t think of hiding them.”