



Produced by Juliet Sutherland, Charles Franks and the
Online Distributed Proofreading Team.









UNDERSTOOD BETSY

BY

DOROTHY CANFIELD
Author of "The Bent Twig," etc.


ILLUSTRATIONS BY
ADA C. WILLIAMSON




[Illustration: Uncle Henry looked at her, eyeing her sidewise over the
top of one spectacle glass. (Page 34)]




CONTENTS

  I    Aunt Harriet Has a Cough
  II   Betsy Holds the Reins
  III  A Short Morning
  IV   Betsy Goes to School
  V    What Grade is Betsy?
  VI   If You Don't Like Conversation in a Book Skip this Chapter!
  VII  Elizabeth Ann Fails in an Examination
  VIII Betsy Starts a Sewing Society
  IX   The New Clothes Fail
  X    Betsy Has a Birthday
  XI   "Understood Aunt Frances"




ILLUSTRATIONS

Uncle Henry looked at her, eying her sidewise
over the top of one spectacle-glass    Frontispiece

Elizabeth Ann stood up before the doctor.
"Do you know," said Aunt Abigail, "I think
it's going to be real nice, having a little girl
in the house again"

She had greatly enjoyed doing her own hair.

"Oh, he's asking for more!" cried Elizabeth Ann

Betsy shut her teeth together hard, and started across

"What's the matter, Molly? What's the matter?"

Betsy and Ellen and the old doll

He had fallen asleep with his head on his arms

Never were dishes washed better!

Betsy was staring down at her shoes, biting her
lips and winking her eyes






CHAPTER I

AUNT HARRIET HAS A COUGH

When this story begins, Elizabeth Ann, who is the heroine of it, was a
little girl of nine, who lived with her Great-aunt Harriet in a
medium-sized city in a medium-sized State in the middle of this country;
and that's all you need to know about the place, for it's not the
important thing in the story; and anyhow you know all about it because
it was probably very much like the place you live in yourself.

Elizabeth Ann's Great-aunt Harriet was a widow who was not very rich or
very poor, and she had one daughter, Frances, who gave piano lessons to
little girls. They kept a "girl" whose name was Grace and who had asthma
dreadfully and wasn't very much of a "girl" at all, being nearer fifty
than forty. Aunt Harriet, who was very tender-hearted, kept her chiefly
because she couldn't get any other place on account of her coughing so
you could hear her all over the house.

So now you know the names of all the household. And this is how they
looked: Aunt Harriet was very small and thin and old, Grace was very
small and thin and middle-aged, Aunt Frances (for Elizabeth Ann called
her "Aunt," although she was really, of course, a
first-cousin-once-removed) was small and thin and if the light wasn't
too strong might be called young, and Elizabeth Ann was very small and
thin and little. And yet they all had plenty to eat. I wonder what was
the matter with them?

It was certainly not because they were not good, for no womenkind in all
the world had kinder hearts than they. You have heard how Aunt Harriet
kept Grace (in spite of the fact that she was a very depressing person)
on account of her asthma; and when Elizabeth Ann's father and mother
both died when she was a baby, although there were many other cousins
and uncles and aunts in the family, these two women fairly rushed upon
the little baby-orphan, taking her home and surrounding her henceforth
with the most loving devotion.

They had said to themselves that it was their manifest duty to save the
dear little thing from the other relatives, who had no idea about how to
bring up a sensitive, impressionable child, and they were sure, from the
way Elizabeth Ann looked at six months, that she was going to be a
sensitive, impressionable child. It is possible also that they were a
little bored with their empty life in their rather forlorn, little brick
house in the medium-sized city, and that they welcomed the occupation
and new interests which a child would bring in.

But they thought that they chiefly desired to save dear Edward's child
from the other kin, especially from the Putney cousins, who had written
down from their Vermont farm that they would be glad to take the little
girl into their family. But "ANYTHING but the Putneys!" said Aunt
Harriet, a great many times. They were related only by marriage to her,
and she had her own opinion of them as a stiffnecked, cold-hearted,
undemonstrative, and hard set of New Englanders. "I boarded near them
one summer when you were a baby, Frances, and I shall never forget the
way they were treating some children visiting there!... Oh, no, I don't
mean they abused them or beat them... but such lack of sympathy, such
perfect indifference to the sacred sensitiveness of child-life, such a
starving of the child-heart... No, I shall never forget it! They had
chores to do... as though they had been hired men!"

Aunt Harriet never meant to say any of this when Elizabeth Ann could
hear, but the little girl's ears were as sharp as little girls' ears
always are, and long before she was nine she knew all about the opinion
Aunt Harriet had of the Putneys. She did not know, to be sure, what
"chores" were, but she took it confidently from Aunt Harriet's voice
that they were something very, very dreadful.

There was certainly neither coldness nor hardness in the way Aunt
Harriet and Aunt Frances treated Elizabeth Ann. They had really given
themselves up to the new responsibility, especially Aunt Frances, who
was very conscientious about everything. As soon as the baby came there
to live, Aunt Frances stopped reading novels and magazines, and re-read
one book after another which told her how to bring up children. And she
joined a Mothers' Club which met once a week. And she took a
correspondence course in mothercraft