It was not until the President of the Adelphi Association had presented the diplomas that Helen Rhinelander arose to perform her part. In the traditional manner of valedictories, she went over many of the incidents of the last few years, during which her own residence at the Adelphi had continued, and brought her essay to a close by a few telling sentences.
“The Adelphi has always been known as a center of great social influence for good, but it has never before cherished in its midst a life-saver. Now it does. There has come to dwell among us a girl who did not hesitate for the fraction of a second to offer her own life to preserve that of another, that other not her friend.”
Helen paused and looked over the sea of faces yet saw but one: the flushed, embarrassed, distressed face of Jessica Trent; who felt that if the speaker added another word to those which had gone before she would surely sink in mortification. Helen, who, had now professed to love her! Helen to do this horrid thing! To hold her up to the gaze of all these strangers because she had done—Well, what anybody would have done, in the same moment and danger!
But she need not have feared. Helen was neither unkind nor indelicate, but she had a purpose in her speech and kept on her way to disclose it, without so much as once again glancing Jessica’s way. Neither, to that young person’s infinite relief, did anybody else. The orator’s reference had been too impersonal, Jessica looked so exactly like all the other maidens in their fine attire, that nobody not in the secret suspected who was meant nor what was coming.
“When one has a heroine for a neighbor, one naturally looks up to that person and wishes to please her. Our life-saving, life-sacrificing heroine had often expressed a certain wish. We have all heard it, ignored it, or forgotten it, until her brave act reawakened a desire to gratify her.
“Once, it seems, she visited a certain poor quarter of this city where little children swarmed in the gutters and wretched mothers were forced by ill-paid toil to neglect these helpless little ones. They have been forgotten by the rest of us; their desperate poverty has mocked at our abundance; there has been none to give them a thought, except our young heroine whose repeated assertion has been: ‘When I grow up, if I can in any way get the money, I will build homes for such poor babies. They shall have big airy rooms with kind nurses to attend them. They shall have plenty of toys, plenty of toys, plenty of everything to make them grow up good and not wicked. How can they help being wicked, living as they do?’ So she has often talked and we have listened, as to the dreams of a child, unknowing whereof she spoke.
“All that is changed. The girl who would lay down her life for another is not a dreamer, she is a practical Christian. And now I, whose life was that one saved, desire to gratify her wish, her dream, if you please, to make it happy reality. I will be one to start a home for those gutter babies, regretting only that I cannot accomplish the work without asking help from others, and I do it for love of this dear, dreaming heroine.
“To build a home and equip it for the children of Avenue A and its swarming tenements I now open a subscription list and head the same with five thousand dollars. Who comes next?”
Jessica was no longer abashed nor self-conscious. All her heart was in the scene that ensued, when Madame followed that eloquent appeal with her own subscription of five thousand. She was well-known as a fairly rich woman and, in proportion to her means, for an extremely liberal one. Therefore, nobody except the “heroine” herself was greatly surprised by her action: but there were others in that rose-adorned hall who loved Madame and had been trained by her. Old pupils that were now, some of them, growing gray-headed women, but who still reverenced their old instructress and followed where she led.
“Two thousand,” said one.