The Bread-winners | Page 7

age. In fancy he saw her, in a neat print dress and white cap,
wielding a broom in one of those fine houses he had helped to build, or
coming home to keep house for him when her mother should fail.
But one day her fate came to her in the shape of a new girl, who sat
near her on the school-bench. It was a slender, pasty young person, an
inch taller and a year or two older than Mattie, with yellow ringlets,
and more pale-blue ribbons on her white dress than poor Mattie had
ever seen before. She was a clean, cold, pale, and selfish little vixen,
whose dresses were never rumpled, and whose temper was never
ruffled. She had not blood enough in her veins to drive her to play or to
anger. But she seemed to poor Mattie the loveliest creature she had ever
seen, and our brown, hard-handed, blowzy tomboy became the pale
fairy's abject slave. Her first act of sovereignty was to change her
vassal's name.
"I don't like Mattie; it ain't a bit romantic. I had a friend in Bucyrus
whose name was Mattie, and she found out somehow--I believe the
teacher told her--that Queen Matilda and Queen Maud was the same
thing in England. So you're Maud!" and Maud she was henceforward,
though her tyrant made her spell it Maude. "It's more elegant with an
e," she said.
Maud was fourteen and her school-days were ending when she made
this new acquaintance. She formed for Azalea Windora one of those
violent idolatries peculiar to her sex and age, and in a fort-' night she
seemed a different person. Azalea was rather clever at her books, and
Maud dug at her lessons from morning till night to keep abreast of her.
Her idol was exquisitely neat in her dress, and Maud acquired, as if by
magic, a scrupulous care of her person. Azalea's blonde head was full
of pernicious sentimentality, though she was saved from actual
indiscretions by her cold and vaporous temperament. In dreams and
fancies, she was wooed and won a dozen times a day by splendid
cavaliers of every race and degree; and as she was thoroughly false and
vain, she detailed these airy adventures, part of which she had imagined

and part read in weekly story-papers, to her worshipper, who listened
with wide eyeballs, and a heart which was just beginning to learn how
to beat. She initiated Maud into that strange world of vulgar and
unhealthy sentiment found in the cheap weeklies which load every
news-stand in the country, and made her tenfold more the child of
dreams than herself.
Miss Windom remained but a few months at the common school, and
then left it for the high school. She told Maud one day of her intended
flitting, and was more astonished than pleased at the passion of grief
into which the announcement threw her friend. Maud clung to her with
sobs that would not be stilled, and with tears that reduced Miss Azalea's
dress to limp and moist wretchedness, but did not move the vain heart
beneath it. "I wonder if she knows," thought Azalea, "how ugly she is
when she bawls like that. Few brunettes can cry stylishly anyhow." Still,
she could not help feeling flattered by such devotion, and she said,
partly from a habit of careless kindness and partly to rescue the rest of
her raiment from the shower which had ruined her neck-ribbon,--
"There, don't be heart-broken. You will be in the high school yourself
in no time."
Maud lifted up her eyes and her heart at these words.
"Yes, I will, darling!"
She had never thought of the high school before. She had always
expected to leave school that very season, and to go into service
somewhere. But from that moment she resolved that nothing should
keep her away from those walls that had suddenly become her Paradise.
Her mother was easily won over. She was a woman of weak will, more
afraid of her children than of her husband, a phenomenon of frequent
occurrence in that latitude. She therefore sided naturally with her
daughter in the contest which, when Maud announced her intention of
entering the high school, broke out in the house and raged fiercely for
some weeks. The poor woman had to bear the brunt of the battle alone,
for Matchin soon grew shy of disputing with his rebellious child. She

was growing rapidly and assuming that look of maturity which comes
so suddenly and so strangely to the notice of a parent. When he
attacked her one day with the brusque exclamation, "Well, Mattie,
what's all this blame foolishness your ma's being tellin' me ?" she
answered him with a cool decision and energy that startled and alarmed
him. She