a very beautiful elderly woman who, despite her age, had a face as unlined and calm as a young girl’s face could be.  One character in the book commented upon the woman’s youth and charm, and another character agreed that she was beautiful and charming, but that she’d be worth more if she had a few lines on her face.  ‘She’s never known tears,’ the character said, ’she’s never lived deeply enough to know tears!  Her life has been just a surface life.  If you go down deep enough into the earth you find water, always.  If you go down deep enough into life you invariably find tears.  It’s one of the unbreakable rules!’” Rose-Marie paused, for a moment, and stole a covert glance at the Superintendent’s face.  “You don’t want me to be a woman whose life is only a surface life,” she pleaded, “and it will be just that if you keep me from helping, as I want to help!  You don’t want me to have a perfectly unlined face when I’m eighty years old?”

All at once the Superintendent was laughing.  “You child!” she exclaimed when the first spasm of mirth had passed, “you blessed child!  If you could know how ridiculously young you looked, sitting there and talking about lined faces—­and yourself at eighty.  Eighty is a long way off, Rose-Marie—­for you!”

The girl joined, a trifle shamefacedly, in the older woman’s laughter.

“I reckon,” she agreed, “that I do take myself too seriously!  But—­well, there are families that I’m just dying to help—­families that I’ve come in contact with through the”—­again she was forced to a slight deceit—­“through the Settlement House.  I’m sure that I could help them if you’d let me visit them, in their own homes.  I’m sure that I’d be able to reform ever so many people if you’d only let me go out and find them.  The city missionary who spoke once in our church, back home, told of wonderful things that he’d done—­of lives that he’d actually made over.  Of course, I couldn’t do the sort of work he did, but I’m sure—­if you’d only give me a chance—­” She paused.

The Superintendent was silent for a moment.  And then—­

“Maybe you’re right, dear,” she said, “and maybe you’re wrong.  Maybe I am cramping your ambitions—­maybe I am hampering your mental and spiritual growth.  But then, again, maybe I’m right!  And I’m inclined to think that I am right.  I’m inclined to adhere to my point, that it will be better for you to wait, until you’re older, before you go into many tenements—­before you do much reforming outside of the Settlement House.  When you’re older and more experienced I’ll be glad to let you do anything—­”

She was interrupted by a rap upon the door.  It was a gentle rap, but it was, above all, a masculine one.  There was real gladness on her face as she rose to answer it.

“I didn’t expect Billy Blanchard—­he thought he had an all-night case,” she told Rose-Marie.  “How nice!”

But Rose-Marie was rising to her feet.