Rosamond had true perceptions, and she was conscientious.  What she said, therefore, when she was told, was,—­

“O dear!  I suppose it is right!  But—­just now!  Right things do come in so terribly askew, like good old Mr. Isosceles, sidling up the broad aisle of a Sunday!  Couldn’t you wait awhile, Ruth?”

“And then somebody else would get the chance.”

“There’s nobody else to be had.”

“Nobody knows till somebody starts up.  They don’t know there’s me to be had yet.”

“O Ruth!  Don’t offer to teach grammar, anyhow!”

“I don’t know.  I might.  I shouldn’t teach it ‘anyhow.’”

Ruth went off, laughing, happy.  She knew she had gamed the home-half of her point.

Her heart beat a good deal, though, when she went into Mrs.
Marchbanks’s library alone, and sat waiting for the lady to come down.

She would rather have gone to Mrs. Hadden first, who was very kind and old-fashioned, and not so overpoweringly grand.  But she had her justification for her attempt from Mrs. Marchbanks’s own lips, and she must take up her opportunity as it came to her, following her clew right end first.  She meant simply to tell Mrs. Marchbanks how she had happened to think of it.

“Good morning,” said the great lady, graciously, wondering not a little what had brought the child, in this unceremonious early fashion, to ask for her.

“I came,” said Ruth, after she had answered the good morning, “because I heard what you were so kind as to say last night about liking my playing; and that you had nobody just now to teach Lily.  I thought, perhaps, you might be willing to try me; for I should like to do it, and I think I could show her all I know; and then I could take lessons myself of Mr. Viertelnote.  I’ve been thinking about it all night.”

Ruth Holabird had a direct little fashion of going straight through whatever crust of outside appearance to that which must respond to what she had at the moment in herself.  She had real self-possession; because she did not let herself be magnetized into a false consciousness of somebody else’s self, and think and speak according to their notions of things, or her reflected notion of what they would think of her.  She was different from Rosamond in this; Rosamond could not help feeling her double,—­Mrs. Grundy’s “idea” of her.  That was what Rosamond said herself about it, when Ruth told it all at home.

The response is almost always there to those who go for it; if it is not, there is no use any way.

Mrs. Marchbanks smiled.

“Does Mrs. Holabird know?”

“O yes; she always knows.”

There was a little distance and a touch of business in Mrs. Marchbanks’s manner after this.  The child’s own impulse had been very frank and amusing; an authorized seeking of employment was somewhat different.  Still, she was kind enough; the impression had been made; perhaps Rosamond, with her “just now” feeling, would have been sensitive to what did not touch Ruth, at the moment, at all.