was able to defend herself on occasion with tongue and fists. She was
so full of life and strength that, when she had no playing to do, she
took pleasure in helping her mother about her work. It warmed Saul
Matchin's heart to see the stout little figure sweeping or scrubbing.
She went to school but did not "learn enough to hurt her," as her
father said; and he used to think that here, at least, would be one
child who would be a comfort to his age. In fancy he saw her, in a neat
print dress and white cap, wielding a broom in one of those fine houses
he had helped to build, or coming home to keep house for him when her
mother should fail.

But one day her fate came to her in the shape of a new girl, who sat
near her on the school-bench. It was a slender, pasty young person, an
inch taller and a year or two older than Mattie, with yellow ringlets,
and more pale-blue ribbons on her white dress than poor Mattie had ever
seen before. She was a clean, cold, pale, and selfish little vixen,
whose dresses were never rumpled, and whose temper was never ruffled.
She had not blood enough in her veins to drive her to play or to anger.
But she seemed to poor Mattie the loveliest creature she had ever seen,
and our brown, hard-handed, blowzy tomboy became the pale fairy's
abject slave. Her first act of sovereignty was to change her vassal's
name.

"I don't like Mattie; it ain't a bit romantic. I had a friend in
Bucyrus whose name was Mattie, and she found out somehow--I believe the
teacher told her--that Queen Matilda and Queen Maud was the same thing
in England. So you're Maud!" and Maud she was henceforward, though her
tyrant made her spell it Maude. "It's more elegant with an _e_," she
said.