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 eyes, not at all abashed at being discovered listening. "It's better than any circus band I ever heard. It's like Jenny Lind when the sun is shining and she has had a leaf of fresh lettuce. It makes me feel in my heart like soda water feels in my nose, all prickly and light," vaguely. "It's—it's wonderful! Take this place," she moved generously away from the crack that Miss Proctor might put her ear to it. "You can hear better. When I grow up I want to play just like that." Mary Rose always wanted to do what other people could do.
"Do you?" Miss Proctor looked at her and forgot that she had considered children unmitigated nuisances. She actually opened the door. "Come in," she said, "and tell Mrs. Matchan that you like her music."
And the result of Mary Rose's attempt to put in words the feeling she had in her heart that was like soda water in her nose, was that Mrs. Matchan went down to the Donovans' and asked if she might be permitted—permitted—to give Mary Rose music lessons.
"You could have knocked me down with the pin feather of a chicken," Aunt Kate told Uncle Larry. "I supposed, of course, she'd come tearin' down to find fault with Mrs. Rawson for runnin' her sewin' machine last night an' I was all ready to tell her that each of us has some rights, but no, it was to offer to give Mary Rose lessons on her piano. She says the child's got talent an' feelin' an' she'd like to see how she'd express them. She had to tell me twice before I could take it in. It isn't often that folks come down here to give a favor. Seems if they only find the way when they want to complain. I never knew Mrs. Matchan to do anythin' for anybody before an' we've lived under the same roof for most two years now."
She had another surprise when Bob Strahan tramped down the basement stairs with a big box of Annie Keller chocolates under his arm. He solemnly presented the candy to Mary Rose.