The covered surrey was a favorite retreat of Mary-'Gusta's.

She had discovered it herself--which made it doubly alluring, of course--and she seldom invited her juvenile friends to share its curtained privacy with her.

It was her playhouse, her tent, and her enchanted castle, much too sacred to be made common property.
Here she came on rainy Saturdays and on many days not rainy when other children, those possessing brothers or sisters, played out of doors.

She liked to play by herself, to invent plays all her own, and these other children--"normal children," their parents called them--were much too likely to laugh instead of solemnly making believe as she did.
Mary-'Gusta was not a normal child; she was "that queer Lathrop young-one"-- had heard herself so described more than once.

She did not like the phrase; "queer" was not so bad--perhaps she was queer--but she had an instinctive repugnance to being called a young-one.