"Miss Grant, you would make a most excellent teacher. You are so direct and so simple, you waste no time, and you evince so much interest in the branches you like. I see your influence on two pupils, Miss Bell, who is a sweet, bright girl, but not in love with study, and mother and I feel really indebted to you for your interest in Miss Craven. When she can once venture out of her shell with the consciousness that she is not so different from the others, the Rubicon will be passed. I do believe she will do it. I am counting a good deal on next year."
"I am glad if I help ever so little," returned Helen with shining eyes, as a soft color transfused her fair face. "And since one and another has been very good to me, I ought to pass the kindness on to someone else."
"'Freely ye have received, freely give.' I am glad that purpose has taken root. There are so many things we can give that only cost us a little trouble, and do more good than the bestowal of money. It is one of the greatest lessons of life."
Miss Aldred smiled upon her pupil, and a warm glow sped through Helen's frame.
"Then I have my mind quite set upon teaching some day. Perhaps I take that from my father, who was a teacher. I saw so little of him, but this year I've wondered a good deal what he really was like, and if we should not have been splendid friends on these lines. I believe he was disappointed about my not being a boy, and it's funny"—with a bright merry laugh. "I've never wanted to be a boy at all. I think girls are nicer."
"The loveliest being to me is a fine, broad, sweet-minded, cultured woman, and I am very glad she is beginning to be thought of as the ideal woman. You have many years before you reach real womanhood, which comes later and is richer than it was twenty years ago. But you are taking some excellent steps along the way."
"Oh, thank you for the praise," said Helen pressing her hand.
If the steps were not in Latin and French she could go bounding along, she thought. In that respect she did not inherit her father's facility nor his love for the abstruse and difficult.
"I suppose I am superficial," she said to herself ruefully. "But why shouldn't one delight in the things one loves best?"
That was one charm about Miss Craven to her. She reveled in poetry. The other girls were full of nonsense chatter in the spare half hours, but they two often slipped away under some tree and read and discussed. There was a fund of romance in each one, though temperament and surroundings had been so different, the one so afraid to express her inmost thought, the other so fearless, not even minding being laughed at.