"Did you know there was an enchanted princess in your house, Aunt Kate?" she demanded excitedly.
Mrs. Donovan had not known it and her surprise made her break her thread. When Mary Rose had explained she grunted something.
"You mean the girl that Mr. Longworthy's crazy about? She's up above an' won't have nothin' to do with men. 'I don't want nothin' in my life but my work,' says she to me, herself. That's all very well for now but let her wait a few years an' she'll sing a different tune or I miss my guess. She ain't enchanted, Mary Rose, she's just pig-headed an' young."
Mary Rose was disappointed. "Mr. Jerry said she was under the spell of the wicked witch, Independence," she insisted. "Wasn't it good of him to take George Washington to board? It's such a relief to have found a pleasant place so near. I'm sure they'll be friendly to him."
Mrs. Donovan mentally planned to slip across the alley and see Mr. Jerry and his Aunt Mary herself about George Washington's board as she looked into the earnest little face so near her own.
"Sure, they will," she said above the whir of the machine. "But you mustn't make friends of everyone you meet, Mary Rose. A city isn't like the country. I suppose you knew everyone in Mifflin?"
"Everyone," with an emphatic shake of her head. "Animals and vegetables as well as people. And everyone knew me."
"Well, it won't be that way in Waloo," Mrs. Donovan explained. "No one knows you an' you don't know anyone. You mustn't go makin' up to strangers. A little girl can't tell who's good an' who's bad."
"She can if she has the right kind of an eye," Mary Rose told her eagerly. "Daddy said so over and over again. He said the good Lord never made bad people because it would be a waste of time and dust when he could just as well make them good. And if you had the right kind of an eye you could see that there was good in every single person. Daddy said I had the right kind. Mine's blue but it isn't in the color, for his eyes were brown and they were right, too. It's something," she hesitated as she tried to explain what was so very dear and simple to her. "It's something to do with the inside and your heart. I shouldn't wonder, Aunt Kate, if you had the right kind. Isn't it easier for you to see that people are kind and good than it is to see them bad?"
It wasn't for Aunt Kate. A two-years' residence in the basement of the Washington had about convinced her that all human nature was sour but she disliked to tell Mary Rose so when Mary Rose so plainly expected her to agree that the world was inhabited by a superior sort of angel. She snipped her threads and drew the plaid skirt from under the needle.