Rose, having been so young when she went to live with them, had never realized the true state of affairs.  Mrs. Wilton and Miss Pamela had not encouraged her making visits in houses where her eyes might have been opened.  Then, too, she was naturally generous, and not sharp-eyed concerning her own needs.  When there were no guests at dinner, and she rose from the table rather unsatisfied after her half-plate of watery soup, her delicate little befrilled chop and dab of French pease, her tiny salad and spoonful of dessert, she never imagined that she was defrauded.  Rose had a singularly sweet, ungrasping disposition, and an almost childlike trait of accepting that which was offered her as the one and only thing which she deserved.  When there was a dinner-party, she sat between an elderly clergyman and a stout judge, who was dieting on account of the danger of apoplexy, with the same graceful agreeableness with which she would have sat between two young men.

Rose had not developed early as to her temperament.  She had played with dolls until Miss Pamela had felt it her duty to remonstrate.  She had charmed the young men whom she had seen, and had not thought about them when once they were out of sight.  Her pulses did not quicken easily.  She had imagination, but she did not make herself the heroine of her dreams.  She was sincerely puzzled at the expression which she saw on the faces of some girls when talking with young men.  She felt a vague shame and anger because of it, but she did not know what it meant.  She had read novels, but the love interest in them was like a musical theme which she, hearing, did not fully understand.  She was not in the least a boylike girl; she was wholly feminine, but the feminine element was held in delicate and gentle restraint.  Without doubt Mrs. Wilton’s old-fashioned gentility, and Miss Pamela’s, and her governess’s, who belonged to the same epoch, had served to mould her character not altogether undesirably.  She was, on the whole, a pleasant and surprising contrast to girls of her age, with her pretty, shy respect for her elders, and lack of self-assertion, along with entire self-possession and good breeding.  However, she had missed many things which poor Miss Farrel had considered desirable for her, and which her hostesses with their self-sanctified evasion had led her to think had been done.

Miss Farrel, teaching in her country school, had had visions of the girl riding a thoroughbred in Central Park, with a groom in attendance; whereas the reality was the old man who served both as coachman and butler, in carefully kept livery, guiding two horses apt to stumble from extreme age through the shopping district, and the pretty face of the girl looking out of the window of an ancient coupe which, nevertheless, had a coat of arms upon its door.  Miss Farrel imagined Rose in a brilliant house-party at Wiltmere, Mrs. Wilton’s and Miss Pamela’s country home; whereas in reality she was roaming about the fields and woods with an