le girl that I can scarcely bear to tell
you. Both were dead, and Rosanna lived with her grandmother, who was a
very proud and important lady indeed. There was a young uncle who might
have been good friends with Rosanna and made things easier but she
scarcely knew him. He had been away to college and after that, three
years in the army. Once a week she wrote to him, in France; but her
grandmother corrected the letters and usually made her write them over,
so they were not very long and certainly were not interesting.

Mrs. Horton was sure that her son's little daughter could never be
worthy of her name and family if she was allowed to "mix," as she put
it, with other children. So Rosanna was not allowed to _have_ any other
children for friends, and Mrs. Horton was too blind with all her
foolish family pride to see that Rosanna was getting queer and vain and
overbearing. Every day they took a drive together, usually through the
parks or out the river road. Mrs. Horton did not like to drive down
town. She did not like the people who filled the streets. She said they
were "frightfully ordinary." It was a shameful thing to be ordinary in
Mrs. Horton's opinion. She had not looked it up in the dictionary or she
would have chosen some other word because being ordinary according to
the dictionary is no crime at all. It is not even a disgrace.

Rosanna's books were always about flowers and fairies, or animals that
talked, or music that romped up and down the bars spelling little words.
There were never any people in them, and if any one sent her a book at
Christmas about some poor little girl who wore a pinafore and helped her
mother and lived in two rooms and was ever so happy, _that_ book had a
way of getting itself changed for some other book about bees or flowers
the very night before Christmas.

"She will know about those things soon enough," said Rosanna's
grandmother.

But every afternoon when they sat in the rose arbor in the middle of the
beautiful garden, Rosanna would get tired reading and she would stare up
at the clouds and see how many faces she could find.

One day she startled and of course shocked her grandmother by saying in
a low voice, "Dean Harriman!"

"Where?" said Mrs. Horton, staring down the walk.

"In that littlest cloud," said Rosanna, unconscious of startling her
grandmother. "It is very good of him, only his nose is even funnier than
it is really. Sort of knobby, you know."

"Please do not s