"Exactly. Quaint, isn't she?" Miss Thorley murmured to Miss Carter. "How old are you, Mary Rose?"
Before Mary Rose could stammer that she was going on fourteen Miss Carter broke in to say that she was off.
"Be good to Mary Rose," she begged. "And, Mary Rose, when you are tired, say so. Miss Thorley will forget all about you when she is interested in the picture and she'll let you stand there until you drop. I know. You have a hard pose with your arms like that and when you are tired be sure and say so."
"Oh, run along, Blanche, and leave us alone," Miss Thorley said impatiently as she got her drawing board and brushes and sat down beside the little table that held her paints.
Miss Carter only waited to make a face at Mary Rose before she shut the door and left the artist and her model together. Neither spoke for a few moments. Mary Rose was too interested in watching Miss Thorley's wonderful fingers and Miss Thorley was too intent on her work for conversation. At last Mary Rose could keep still no longer.
"Are you really an enchanted princess?" she asked eagerly.
"I should scarcely call myself that, Mary Rose. A working woman is the way I say it."
"Then what did Mr. Jerry mean? Don't you think he is an awfully nice man? He makes me think of Alvin Lewis in Mifflin, only Alvin isn't quite so stylish. He is a clerk in the drug store in Mifflin and he was real pleasant. When Gladys and I only had a nickel he'd let us have a glass of ice cream soda with two spoons. He was such a pleasant man. But what did Mr. Jerry mean," she returned to her mutton with a suddenness that made Miss Thorley blur a line, "when he said you were under the spell of the wicked witch Independence?"
"How should I know?" And Miss Thorley frowned in a way that made Mary Rose wish she wouldn't. It quite spoiled her face to frown with it.
"What is Independence?" Mary Rose frowned, too. As Aunt Kate had said, frowns were contagious. Mary Rose had caught one now in a flash.