to get red ants off of a plant? But you haven't any plants.
Wouldn't you feel more friendly if you had a beautiful pink geranium
growing in your window?"

"There isn't sun enough in this flat to keep a geranium alive,"
grumbled Miss Adams, who seemed determined to be lonely and
faultfinding.

Mary Rose sighed. "Of course, no one can have the sun all the time,"
she said gently, as if to excuse old Sol for not lingering longer in
Miss Adams' small apartment. "I'll let you have Jenny Lind for a while
tomorrow," she suggested after a moment of frowning thought. "She'll
cheer you up."

Miss Adams wanted to refuse to be cheered by Jenny Lind, but she had
not the courage, and when Mary Rose brought the bird the next morning
she brought also a small glass dish filled with pebbles on which rested
a little green bulb.

"Inside it is a Japanese lily," she said, and there was both pride and
awe in her voice. "Don't you wonder how God ever folded it up in such
a small package? Mr. Jerry's Aunt Mary was going to throw it away.
She said it was too late, that it ought to have been planted months
ago, but I said wouldn't she please give it a chance. My daddy used to
say that was all people needed, just a chance. Mrs. Mullins had one in
Mifflin, I mean a lily, and it didn't need hardly any sun. It just
grew and grew. You can sit beside it in the window and pretend you're
a Japanese queen. Don't you think it's fun to pretend? And imagine?
It's almost the same as having everything you want. I've imagined I
was a queen on a throne and the whale that swallowed Jonah--he must
have been so surprised--and a circus rider and an angel with a harp and
a pussy willow. I don't know which I liked the best. It helps a lot
when things go wrong to imagine they're right. You'll like to see the
Japanese lily come out of its bulb, won't you?"

Miss Adams was polite enough to say she would, although she frowned at
the glass dish as she set it in the window. If Mary Rose had seen as
much of the world as she had, she wouldn't think that to imagine a
thing was the same as having it.

"I'll tell Mr. Jerry's Aunt Mary you're much obliged," Mary Rose
suggested when she left.

Another day Miss Proctor found her leaning against the door of the
apartment she shared with Mrs. Matchan, listening entranced to the
music that Mrs. Matchan was making with her ten fingers and her piano.

"Isn't it beautiful?" Mary Rose looked up with shining ey