"Cast no aspersions upon my ability to keep this house, young lady," she cried gayly. "And you will be no older than many of the girls and boys in your class. Now take off your dress and go mix your batter, and in ten minutes I'll be there, and then William will come home, and then we'll have supper, and then you must go to bed early."
When William came, there was no trace of Sarah's tears. He teased her gayly, as William always did, and said, as he helped himself to a fifth waffle, that the first four samples were pretty good, and that now he was really beginning to eat. It was not until she was safely in bed that the lump came back into her throat. This going away to school seemed suddenly worse than the long struggle against Uncle Daniel. She was going to live among strangers,—she would hear no more dear, familiar Pennsylvania-German, she would see only strange, critical faces. The Normal students would probably laugh at her, as she laughed at Jacob Kalb. They might make rhymes about her, as she made rhymes about Jacob.
Laura, who tiptoed into the room to put the red coat with its shortened sleeves into her trunk, heard her whisper.
"What did you say, Sarah?" she asked.
Sarah hid her face in her pillow in an agony of embarrassment. She could not possibly tell Laura what she was saying to herself, and Laura, thinking that she was talking in her sleep, tiptoed out again to complete her preparations for the next day's journey.
Before Sarah went to sleep, she smothered an hysterical giggle. One possible rhyme which might occur to the Normalites had come into her mind. It was that which she had been saying to herself. It was ominous, but she could not help laughing. It ran,—
"Sarah's Dutch,
She is not much."