"Why should she be hurt?" said Mrs. Hargrave.
"Why, grandmother thinks I should not go out of my class."
"Class is all right," said Mrs. Hargrave. "It is very necessary, but what you want to look for, Rosanna, is worth. Suppose Helen here was not in your own class. Suppose her father was a laboring man of some sort, and she lived away from this part of town, that wouldn't change Helen."
Helen looked up in amazement. "But my father is—"
Mrs. Hargrave interrupted. "I will tell you what I will do, Rosanna, I will talk to your grandmother myself if she makes any objections to your going to school and all the rest." She rose as she spoke, and they wandered out to the rose garden where coffee was served for Mrs. Hargrave and where the children offered their gifts.
When she went home at last, she put an arm around each child. "This is the happiest birthday I have had. Good-night, and thank you! I will help you all I can, Rosanna, and I feel very sure, Helen, that your savings or the fairy godmother will take you to college with Rosanna. Two little girls as nice and sweet and well-bred as you ought to be friends all your lives."
She kissed them both and, carrying her presents, went down the steps leaning on the arm of her servant.
"I feel full of a happy sadness," Rosanna sighed. "I don't see why, do you?"
"No," said Helen, "only that she is so perfectly lovely. She is just as though there was two parts to her. The outside pretty, but old and wrinkled and kind of high and grand, while there is somebody just too sweet, and real young and dancy and loving on the inside. And the inside one can never grow old at all, but will go right on understanding how you feel, and when the outside gets too old to last any longer, why, she will just go and be a young, young angel."
"I guess that's it," said Rosanna. "But what a fuss there is about class and position and where you were born, isn't there?"