Rose’s father had thought the world of her, and he had told her and told anyone else who would listen, that she was an unusual child who could do anything she set out to do. Once when she was dancing around their kitchen showing off, he said, “One of these days Rose is going to show us how the birds fly.” There was no end to their conversations, and they agreed on everything. After he was dead, when she set about remembering him, she found that she had memorized him, and he was so clear in her mind that, as she listened to her mother and the neighbors talking about him, all she had to do was to look above their heads and she could see him — not as he had been but as he was now, above them all and smiling down on them as he listened to the nice things they were saying about him, although none of them had had much opinion of him when he was alive. She hated them all, but the more she hated them the more she feared them, because she knew that if they found out about her dreams they would laugh at her and call her “Miss Importance.” Her mother had always said that she had too good an idea of herself and that she was too fanciful.