“Don’t you worry, Manda. I’ll make you sand-tarts and lemon pie and everything you like every time you come home still.”
“Millie, you good soul! With that promise to help me I’ll work like a Trojan and win some honors at old M.S.N.S. Just watch me!”
Amanda did work. She brought to her studies the same whole-hearted interest and enthusiasm she evinced in her hunts for wild flowers, she applied to them the same dogged determination and untiring efforts she showed in her long search for hidden bird nests, with the inevitable result that her brain, naturally alert and brilliant, grasped with amazing celerity both the easy and the hard lessons of the Normal Training course.
Millie’s prediction proved well founded--Amanda Reist stood well in her classes. In botany she was the preeminent figure of the entire school. “Ask Amanda Reist, she’ll tell you,” became the slogan among the students. “Yellow violets, lady-slippers, wild ginger--she’ll tell you where they grow or get a specimen for you.”
When the time for graduation drew near Amanda was able to carry home the glad news that she ranked third in her class and was chosen to deliver an oration at the Commencement exercises.
“That I want to hear,” declared Millie, “and I’ll get a new dress to wear to it, too.”
On the June morning when the Commencement exercises of the First Pennsylvania State Normal School took place there were hundreds of happy, eager visitors on the campus at Millersville, and later in the great auditorium, but none was happier than Millie Hess, Reists’ hired girl. The new dress, bought in Lancaster and made by Mrs. Reist and Aunt Rebecca, was a white lawn flecked with black. Millie had decided on a plain waist with high neck, the inch wide band at the throat edged with torchon lace, after the style she usually wore, the skirt made full and having above the hem, as Millie put it, “Just a few tucks, then wait a while, then tucks again.” But Amanda, happening on the scene as the dress was tried on, protested at the high neck.
“Please, Millie,” she coaxed, “do have the neck turned down, oh, just a little! I’d have a nice pleated ruffle of white net around it and a little V in front. You’d look fine that way.”
“Me-fine! Go long with you, Amanda Reist! Ain’t I got two good eyes and a lookin’-glass? But I guess I would look more like other folks if I had it made like you say. But now I don’t want it too low. You dare fix it so it looks right.” Displaying the same meek acquiescence in the desire of Amanda she bought a stylish hat instead of the big flat sailor with its taffeta bow she generally chose. The hat was Amanda’s selection, a small, modest little thing with pale pink and gray roses misty with a covering of black tulle.
“Me with pink roses on my hat and over forty years old,” said Millie wonderingly, but when she tried it on and saw the improvement in her appearance she smiled happily. “It’s the prettiest hat I ever had and I’ll hold it up and take good care of it so it’ll last me years. I’m gettin’ fixed up for sure once, only my new shoes don’t have no squeak in ’em at all.”