“I’ll teach you. And you’ve got to learn before you can be a Fire Maker, you know.”
“Yes—I know,” said Lizette slowly, “and I’d like it, but you—Olga, you’d get sick of it. You’re used to being alone. You wouldn’t want any one around every day—you know you wouldn’t.”
“It would be better for me than eating alone, and better for you than the Cafeteria. Come, Lizette, say ‘yes.’”
“Yes, then,” Lizette answered. “At least—I’ll try it for a month, if you’ll promise to tell me frankly at the end of the month if you’d rather not keep on.”
“Agreed,” said Olga.
“My! But it will be good to have a change from the Cafeteria!” Lizette admitted.
And now, having opened her heart to the sunshine of love, Olga began to find many pleasant things springing up there. She no longer held Miss Laura and the girls at arm’s length. They were all friends, even Lena Barton and Eva Bicknell, whom until now she had regarded with scornful indifference, and Sadie Page, whom she had barely tolerated for Elizabeth’s sake—even these she counted now as friends; and Laura, noting the growing comradeship—seeing week by week the strengthening of the bond between the girls, said to herself, joyfully,
“It was in Olga’s heart that the fire of love burst into flame, and it has leaped from heart to heart until now I believe in all my girls it is burning—‘The love of man to man—the love of man to God.’”