"I don't care very much for Jim Harvey." Peter picked up a stone and shied it joyously at a thrush in the bushes.
"And I don't know as I want you to," he declared boldly.

"I'll come to that dancing school if I possibly can, Ada, and if I can't you'll know it isn't because I don't wish to." "You must want to with all your might and that'll make it come true.

You can wish it on my amethyst ring." "You won't take it off until October, Ada ?" "I truly won't." And it took Peter such a long time to get the ring on and held in place while the wish was properly made, that it was practically no time at all until the others found them on the way home as they came laughing up the hill.
As it happened, however, Peter did not get to the dancing school once that winter.

The first of the cold spell Ellen had slipped on the ice, to the further trying of her lame back, and there were things to be done to it which the doctor said could not possibly be put off, so it happened that the mortgage dragon did not get his payment and Peter gave up the high school to get a place in Greenslet's grocery at Bloombury.
And since there were the books to be made up after supper, and as Bet, the mare, after being driven in the delivery wagon all day, could not be let stand half the night in the cold at the schoolhouse door, it turned out that Peter had not been once to the dancing school.

In the beginning he had done something for himself in the way of a hall for dancing, thrown out from the House of the Shining Walls, in which he and the Princess Ada, to lovely, soundless strains, had whirled away, and found occasion to say things to each other such as no ballroom could afford;--bright star pointed occasions which broke and scattered before the little hints of sound that crept up the stair to advise him that Ellen was stifling back the pain for fear of waking him.