You don’t grow up, she reasoned now, until you begin to evaluate yourself, to recognize your good traits and acknowledge that you have a few faults.

She felt a little better about Leonard out here in the country. It was just being close to nature, she supposed. In the country you felt as you never could in town the return of...

The older I get the more mixed up life seems. When you’re little, it’s all so plain. It’s all laid out like a game ready to play. You think you know exactly how it’s going...

New things are easier to do than old familiar things when there’s going to be a change,” Betsy decided profoundly.

We’re growing up and I don’t like it,” said Tacy, as they say at Heinz’s later, drinking coffee.

The wastes of snow on the hill were ghostly in the moonlight. The stars were piercingly bright.

Betsy liked to talk. Her father always said she got it from her mother, and her mother always said she got it from her father. But whomever she got it from she was certainly a...

She tried to act as though it were nothing to go to the library alone. But her happiness betrayed her. Her smile could not be restrained, and it spread from her tightly pressed mouth, to...

I’ve got to stop thinking about myself so much–about how I look, how I’m impressing someone, whether I’m popular or not. I’ve got to start thinking about other people, all the people I meet.

Betsy did not answer. She was a talker, her family always said, but sometimes when she most wanted to talk she couldn’t say a word.

Julia was as happy as Betsy was, almost. One nice thing about Julia was that she rejoiced in other people’s luck.

Thoughts are such fleet magic things. Betsy’s thoughts swept a wide arc while Uncle Keith read her poem aloud. She thought of Julia learning to sing with Mrs. Poppy. She thought of Tib learning to...

It looks like something out of Whittier’s “Snowbound,”‘ Julia said. Julia could always think of things like that to say.

In silence the three of them looked at the sunset and thought about God.

The most important part of religion isn’t in any church. It’s down in your own heart. Religion is in your thoughts, and in the way you act from day to day, in the way you...

It was June, and the world smelled of roses. The sunshine was like powdered gold over the grassy hillside.

Betsy was so full of joy that she had to be alone. She went upstairs to her bedroom and sat down on Uncle Keith’s trunk. Behind Tacy’s house the sun had set. A wind had...

Come in early, so there’ll be time to pop corn,’ Mrs. Ray said. If she mentioned popping corn, they always came in early. So she usually mentioned it.

Isn’t it mysterious to begin a new journal like this? I can run my fingers through the fresh clean pages but I cannot guess what the writing on them will be.

Our lives can hold just so much. If they’re filled with one thing, they can’t be filled with another. We ought to do a lot of thinking about what we want to fill them with.

Well, Betsy,” he said, “your mother tells me that you are going to use Uncle Keith’s trunk for a desk. That’s fine. You need a desk. I’ve often noticed how much you like to write....

And yet, even as she spoke, she knew that she did not wish to come back. not to stay, not to live. She loved the little yellow cottage more than she loved any place on...

Betsy returned to her chair, took off her coat and hat, opened her book and forgot the world again.

They soon stopped being ten years old. But whatever age they were seemed to be exactly the right age for having fun.

Betsy liked to read her stories aloud and she read them like an actress. She made her voice low and thrillingly deep. She made it shake with emotion. She laughed mockingly and sobbed wildly when...