“Oh, you have, have you, at last?” said Bell; “and pray why didn’t you bring it sooner?” The girl was going to answer, but the maid interrupted her, saying—“Come, come, none of your excuses; you are a little idle, good-for-nothing thing, to disappoint Miss Bell upon her birthday. But now you have brought it, let us look at it!” The little girl gave the lace without reply, and the maid desired her to go about her business, and not to expect to be paid; for that her mistress could not see anybody, _because_ she was in a room full of company. “May I call again, madam, this afternoon?” said the child, timidly. “Lord bless my stars!” replied the maid, “what makes people so poor, I _wonders_! I wish mistress would buy her lace at the warehouse, as I told her, and not of these folks. Call again! yes, to be sure. I believe you’d call, call, call twenty times for twopence.” However ungraciously the permission to call again was granted, it was received with gratitude. The little girl departed with a cheerful countenance; and Bell teazed her maid till she got her to sew the long wished-for lace upon her cuffs. Unfortunate Bell!—All dinner time passed, and people were so hungry, so busy, or so stupid, that not an eye observed her favourite piece of finery. Till at length she was no longer able to conceal her impatience, and turning to Laura, who sat next to her, she said, “You have no lace upon your cuffs. Look how beautiful mine is!—is not it? Don’t you wish your mamma could afford to give some like it? But you can’t get any if she would, for this was made on purpose for me on my birthday, and nobody can get a bit more anywhere, if they would give the world for it.” “But cannot the person who made it,” said Laura, “make any more like it?” “No, no, no!” cried Bell; for she had already learned, either from her maid or her mother, the mean pride which values things not for being really pretty or useful, but for being such as nobody else can procure. “Nobody can get any like it, I say,” repeated Bell; “nobody in all London can make it but one person, and that person will never make a bit for anybody but me, I am sure. Mamma won’t let her, if I ask her not.” “Very well,” said Laura, coolly, “I do not want any of it; you need not be so violent: I assure you that I don’t want any of it.” “Yes, but you do, though,” said Bell, more angrily. “No, indeed,” said Laura, smiling. “You do, in the bottom of your heart; but you say you don’t to plague me, I know,” cried Bell, swelling with disappointed vanity. “It is pretty for all that, and it cost a great deal of money too, and nobody shall have any like it, if they cried their eyes out.” Laura received this declaration in silence—Rosamond smiled; and at her smile the ill-suppressed rage of the spoiled child burst forth into the seventh and loudest fit of crying which had yet been heard on her birthday.