Within a year, it seemed perfectly natural to Maud that Azalea should do her errands and talk to her about her eyes; and Miss Windom found her little airs of superiority of no avail in face of the girl who had grown prettier, cleverer, and taller than herself.  It made no difference that Maud was still a vulgar and ignorant girl—­for Azalea was not the person to perceive or appreciate these defects.  She saw her, with mute wonder, blooming out before her very eyes, from a stout, stocky, frowzy child, with coarse red cheeks and knuckles like a bootblack, into a tall, slender girl, whose oval face was as regular as a conic section, and whose movements were as swift, strong, and graceful, when she forgot herself, as those of a race-horse.  There were still the ties of habit and romance between them.  Azalea, whose brother was a train-boy on the Lake Shore road, had a constant supply of light literature, which the girls devoured in the long intervals of their studies.  But even the romance of Miss Matchin had undergone a change.  While Azalea still dreamed of dark-eyed princes, lords of tropical islands, and fierce and tender warriors who should shoot for her the mountain eagle for his plumes, listen with her to the bulbul’s song in valleys of roses, or hew out a throne for her in some vague and ungeographical empire, the reveries of Miss Maud grew more and more mundane and reasonable.  She was too strong and well to dream much; her only visions were of a rich man who should love her for her fine eyes.  She would meet him in some simple and casual way; he would fall in love at sight, and speedily prosper in his wooing; they would be married,—­privately, for Maud blushed and burned to think of her home at such times,—­and then they would go to New York to live.  She never wasted conjecture on the age, the looks, the manner of being of this possible hero.  Her mind intoxicated itself with the thought of his wealth.  She went one day to the Public Library to read the articles on Rothschild and Astor in the encyclopedias.  She even tried to read the editorial articles on gold and silver in the Ohio papers.

She delighted in the New York society journals.  She would pore for hours over those wonderful columns which described the weddings and the receptions of rich tobacconists and stock-brokers, with lists of names which she read with infinite gusto.  At first, all the names were the same to her, all equally worshipful and happy in being printed, black on white, in the reports of these upper-worldly banquets.  But after a while her sharp intelligence began to distinguish the grades of our republican aristocracy, and she would skip the long rolls of obscure guests who figured at the:  “coming-out parties” of thrifty shop-keepers of fashionable ambition, to revel among the genuine swells whose fathers were shop-keepers.  The reports of the battles of the Polo Club filled her with a sweet intoxication.  She knew the names of the combatants by heart, and had her own opinion as to the comparative eligibility of Billy Buglass and Tim Blanket, the young men most in view at that time in the clubs of the metropolis.