“It’s no use in talking, Granny,” Maida said joyfully one day. “My leg is getting stronger. I jumped twenty jumps to-day without stopping.” After that her progress was rapid. She learned to jump in the rope with Rosie. They were a pretty sight. People passing often gave them more than one glance—Rosie so vivid and sparkling, in the scarlet cape and hat all velvety jet-blacks, satiny olives and brilliant crimsons—Maida slim, delicate, fairy-like in her long squirrel-coat and cap, her airy ringlets streaming in the breeze and the eyes that had once been so wistful now shining with happiness. “Do you know what you look like, Maida?” Rosie said once. Before Maida could answer, she went on. “You look like that little mermaid princess in Anderson’s fairy tales—the one who had to suffer so to get legs like mortals.” “Do I?” Maida laughed. “Now isn’t it strange I have always thought that you look like somebody in a fairy tale, too. You’re like Rose-Red in ‘Rose-Red and Snow-White.’ I think,” she added, flushing, for she was a little afraid that it was not polite to say things like this, “that you are the beautifulest girl I ever saw.” “Why, that’s just what I think of you,” Rosie said in surprise. “I just love black hair,” Maida said. “And I just adore golden hair,” Rosie said. “Now, isn’t that strange?” “I guess,” Maida announced after a moment of thought, “people like what they haven’t got.” After a while, Rosie taught Maida to jump in the big rope with a half a dozen children at once. Maida never tired of this. When she heard the rope swishing through the air, a kind of excitement came over her. She was proud to think that she had caught the trick—that something inside would warn her when to jump—that she could be sure that this warning would not come an instant too soon or too late. The consciousness of a new strength and a new power made a different child of her. It made her eyes sparkle like gray diamonds. It made her cheeks glow like pink peonies. By this time she could spin tops with the best of them—sometimes she had five tops going at once. This was a sport of which the W.M.N.T.’s never tired. They kept it up long into the twilight. Sometimes Granny would have to ring the dinner-bell a half a dozen times before Maida appeared. Maida did not mean to be disobedient. She simply did not hear the bell. Granny’s scoldings for this carelessness were very gentle—Maida’s face was too radiant with her triumph in this new skill. There was something about Primrose Court—the rows of trees welded into a yellow arch high over their heads, the sky showing through in diamond-shaped glints of blue, the tiny trim houses and their tinier, trimmer yards, the doves pink-toeing everywhere, their throats bubbling color as wonderful as the old Venetian glass in the Beacon Street house, the children running and shouting, the very smell of the dust which their pattering feet threw up—something in the look of all this made Maida’s spirits leap.