But one day her fate came to her in the shape of a new girl, who sat near her on the school-bench.  It was a slender, pasty young person, an inch taller and a year or two older than Mattie, with yellow ringlets, and more pale-blue ribbons on her white dress than poor Mattie had ever seen before.  She was a clean, cold, pale, and selfish little vixen, whose dresses were never rumpled, and whose temper was never ruffled.  She had not blood enough in her veins to drive her to play or to anger.  But she seemed to poor Mattie the loveliest creature she had ever seen, and our brown, hard-handed, blowzy tomboy became the pale fairy’s abject slave.  Her first act of sovereignty was to change her vassal’s name.

“I don’t like Mattie; it ain’t a bit romantic.  I had a friend in Bucyrus whose name was Mattie, and she found out somehow—­I believe the teacher told her—­that Queen Matilda and Queen Maud was the same thing in England.  So you’re Maud!” and Maud she was henceforward, though her tyrant made her spell it Maude.  “It’s more elegant with an e,” she said.

Maud was fourteen and her school-days were ending when she made this new acquaintance.  She formed for Azalea Windora one of those violent idolatries peculiar to her sex and age, and in a fort-’ night she seemed a different person.  Azalea was rather clever at her books, and Maud dug at her lessons from morning till night to keep abreast of her.  Her idol was exquisitely neat in her dress, and Maud acquired, as if by magic, a scrupulous care of her person.  Azalea’s blonde head was full of pernicious sentimentality, though she was saved from actual indiscretions by her cold and vaporous temperament.  In dreams and fancies, she was wooed and won a dozen times a day by splendid cavaliers of every race and degree; and as she was thoroughly false and vain, she detailed these airy adventures, part of which she had imagined and part read in weekly story-papers, to her worshipper, who listened with wide eyeballs, and a heart which was just beginning to learn how to beat.  She initiated Maud into that strange world of vulgar and unhealthy sentiment found in the cheap weeklies which load every news-stand in the country, and made her tenfold more the child of dreams than herself.

Miss Windom remained but a few months at the common school, and then left it for the high school.  She told Maud one day of her intended flitting, and was more astonished than pleased at the passion of grief into which the announcement threw her friend.  Maud clung to her with sobs that would not be stilled, and with tears that reduced Miss Azalea’s dress to limp and moist wretchedness, but did not move the vain heart beneath it.  “I wonder if she knows,” thought Azalea, “how ugly she is when she bawls like that.  Few brunettes can cry stylishly anyhow.”  Still, she could not help feeling flattered by such devotion, and she said, partly from a habit of careless kindness and partly to rescue the rest of her raiment from the shower which had ruined her neck-ribbon,—­