She valued his friendship; she would like to keep it always, she added, but she did not want his love. She did not want any man's love. That was why Mr. Jerry shook his fist at the white face of the Washington and swore that he loathed the idea of feminine independence, loathed it from the very bottom of his heart.
"Why, Mary Rose, wherever have you been?" demanded startled Mrs. Donovan, when Mary Rose, a trifle breathless and minus George Washington, slipped into the basement flat. "I've been lookin' everywhere for you."
"I'm sorry but I just had to find a boarding place for George Washington. Oh, Aunt Kate, do you suppose there's any way a girl like me can earn fifty cents every week?"
CHAPTER IV
When Larry Donovan saw his niece she had changed her shabby boy's suit of blue serge for the clothes that Ella Murphy had outgrown. Ella had astonished and disgusted her mother by lengthening herself, in a single night, it seemed to the outraged Mrs. Murphy, to such an extent that a new outfit was necessary.
"It may be well enough for asparagus and tulips to grow like that, but it's all wrong for a girl," she had said resentfully. "I just wish the Power that lengthened her had to find her dresses and petticoats and things to make her decent to go to the grandmother that's never seen her. Here I am, all but ready to start, an' I have to get her new clothes. Childern may be a blessing, there's folks that say they are, but there's times I can't see anything but the worry and the expense of 'em."
So the lengthened Ella's discarded garments had been left behind for Mrs. Donovan to dispose of. They had been packed away and forgotten until Mary Rose arrived and reminded her Aunt Kate that a perfectly good outfit for a girl of fourteen was in one of her closets.
Fortunately Ella had been slim as well as tall and the middy blouse that Mrs. Donovan tried on Mary Rose did not look too much as if it had been made for her grandmother. The bright plaid skirt trailed on the floor but Aunt Kate turned back the hem which still left the skirt hanging considerably below Mary Rose's shabby shoe tops, much to her delight.
She hung over the machine, her tongue clattering an unwearied accompaniment to the whir of the wheel, as Mrs. Donovan sewed the basted hem.