Martin laughed. “There’s nothing of the snob about you, is there? I believe you see the inside of people without much looking on the exterior.”
“I hope so,” she said. “Shall we turn back now? I’m cold.”
She was cold, but it was an inward reaction from the joy of being with Martin again. His words about Isabel and his glad recounting of the hours he spent with her chilled the girl. She felt that he was becoming more deeply entangled in the web Isabel spun for him. To the country girl’s observant, analytical mind it seemed almost impossible that a girl of Isabel’s type could truly love a plain man like Martin Landis or could ever make him happy if she married him.
“It’s just one more conquest for her to boast about,” Amanda thought. “Just as the mate of the Jack-in-the-pulpit invites the insects to her honey and then catches them in a hopeless trap, so women like Isabel play with men like Martin. No wonder the root of the Jack-in-the-pulpit is bitter--it’s symbolic of the aftermath of the honeyed trap.”
Worried, unhappy though she was, Amanda’s second year of teaching was, in the opinion of the pupils, highly successful. Some of the wonder-thoughts of her heart she succeeded in imparting to them in that little rural school. As she tugged at the bell rope and sent the ding-dong pealing over the countryside with its call that brought the children from many roads and byways she felt an irresistible thrill pulsating through her. It was as if the big bell called, “Here, come here, come here! We’ll teach you knowledge from books, and that rarer thing, wisdom. We’ll teach you in this little square room the meaning of the great outside world, how to meet the surging tide of the cities and battle squarely. We’ll show you how to carry to commerce and business and professional life the honesty and wholesomeness and sincerity of the country. We’ll teach you that sixteen ounces make a pound and show you why you must never forget that, but must keep exalted and unstained the high standards of courage and right.”
Some world-old philosophical conception of the insignificance of her own joys and sorrows as compared with the magnitude of the earth and its vast solar system came to her at times.
“My life,” she thought, “seems so important to me and yet it is so little a thing to weep about if my days are not as full of joy as I want them to be. I must step out from myself, detach myself and get a proper perspective. After all, my little selfish wants and yearnings are so small a portion of the whole scheme of things.
’For all that laugh, and all that weep
And all that breathe are one
Slight ripple on the boundless deep
That moves, and all is gone.’”
Looking back over the winter months of that second year of teaching Amanda sometimes wondered how she was able to do her work in the schoolroom acceptably. But the strain of being a stoic left its marks upon her.
“My goodness,” said Aunt Rebecca one day in February when a blizzard held her snowbound at the Reist farmhouse, “that girl must be doin’ too much with this teachin’ and basket makin’ and who knows what not! She looks pale and sharp-chinned. Ain’t you noticed?” she asked Mrs. Reist.