Maud was fourteen and her school-days were ending when she made this
new acquaintance. She formed for Azalea Windora one of those violent
idolatries peculiar to her sex and age, and in a fort-' night she
seemed a different person. Azalea was rather clever at her books, and
Maud dug at her lessons from morning till night to keep abreast of her.
Her idol was exquisitely neat in her dress, and Maud acquired, as if by
magic, a scrupulous care of her person. Azalea's blonde head was full
of pernicious sentimentality, though she was saved from actual
indiscretions by her cold and vaporous temperament. In dreams and
fancies, she was wooed and won a dozen times a day by splendid
cavaliers of every race and degree; and as she was thoroughly false and
vain, she detailed these airy adventures, part of which she had
imagined and part read in weekly story-papers, to her worshipper, who
listened with wide eyeballs, and a heart which was just beginning to
learn how to beat. She initiated Maud into that strange world of vulgar
and unhealthy sentiment found in the cheap weeklies which load every
news-stand in the country, and made her tenfold more the child of
dreams than herself.

Miss Windom remained but a few months at the common school, and then
left it for the high school. She told Maud one day of her intended
flitting, and was more astonished than pleased at the passion of grief
into which the announcement threw her friend. Maud clung to her with
sobs that would not be stilled, and with tears that reduced Miss
Azalea's dress to limp and moist wretchedness, but did not move the
vain heart beneath it. "I wonder if she knows," thought Azalea, "how
ugly she is when she bawls like that. Few brunettes can cry stylishly
anyhow." Still, she could not help feeling flattered by such devotion,
and she said, partly from a habit of careless kindness and partly to
rescue the rest of her raiment from the shower which had ruined her