kind of work I care for," and she shrugged her shoulders.
"I should think your Mrs. Evans would die."

"She hasn't time to die," Mary Rose told her seriously. "She's too busy
taking care of Mr. Evans and her family and helping other people. She's
a fine woman, everyone said in Mifflin. When I grow up I want to be just
like her," emphatically.

"Oh, Mary Rose! You want to be something besides a drudge. Women have
other things to do now but cook and sew and look after crying babies."

"Babies don't cry unless there's a pin sticking into them or they have
the colic, and, anyway, I think babies are the dearest things God ever
made. I'd like to have twelve when I grow up, six boys and six girls. I
don't ever want an only child. It's too lonesome. Don't you ever get
lonesome, Miss Thorley?"

"I have my work," Miss Thorley told her briefly.

Mary Rose watched her at her work. She admired Miss Thorley's swift,
sure strokes, but she drew a sigh that came from the tips of her shabby
shoes as she murmured: "All the same I don't understand just what Mr.
Jerry meant."

Miss Thorley did not answer, unless a frown could be considered an
answer. She painted for perhaps five minutes longer, but her strokes
were not so swift nor so sure. At last she threw down her brushes as if
she hated herself for doing it, but realized she could do nothing else.

"Mary Rose," she said crossly. Even Mary Rose could see that she was not
pleased with something. "I don't feel like painting today. It's too
warm or something. If I could find a little girl about," she looked
critically at Mary Rose, "about ten years old, I think I'd ask her to go
out to the lake with me."

"Oh!" Mary Rose forgot that she was posing and dropped both jam jars.
She almost dropped Jenny Lind, too. She remembered Aunt Kate's request
as she clung to the cage. "Would one going on fourteen be too old?" Her
voice trembled and her heart beat fast for fear Miss Thorley would say
that was far too old. "If she should be a long, long time, perhaps three
years, before she got to fourteen?"

Miss Thorley's face was as sober as a judge's as she considered this.
"Well," she said at last very slowly, "one going on fourteen might do.
Run and ask your aunt and I'll meet you downstairs."

Mary Rose obeyed after she had hugged Miss Thorley. "You're an angel,"
she exclaimed fervently, "a regular seraphim and cherubim angel, if you
are independent."

She almost fel