Then she passed him and hurried across the sidewalk into the prayer-meeting room.
Junior stood his ground and gave his hand to the girls in turn as they alighted from the omnibus. In his heart he was saying to himself: “Oh, Hell! I didn’t say I ‘liked’ her. I was trying to say that she was good-looking for the first time in her life, and maybe the last. But if she could keep that up, she’d be some punkins to look at, and that’s the truth!”
Junior’s words had been overheard by the class behind Edith. They stood back, carefully scrutinizing her, and realized that what he had said was the truth.
Edith worked her way to one side of the room and from her left hand let slide down among the folds of her dress the copy of her speech that she was carrying. With a deft foot she kicked it under the seats, confident that no one had observed the movement. In this confidence she retained her poise and her pose, and it was thus that Mrs. Spellman saw her.
At that instant the voice of the organ, rolling an unaccustomed march, came to their ears. Again involuntarily the thing that was deep in Edith’s mind arose to her lips, “Mahala!” Mahala’s mother was standing in the door, smiling and bowing and speaking in her gracious way to all of the boys and girls, cautioning them to keep cool, to keep in mind the opening phrases of their speeches and the rest must follow; then she made way for the Superintendent, who ordered them to “Come on!” and in mechanical obedience, Edith led the way from the room. In the darkness of the early June evening she could see a blur of white waiting on the sidewalk.
In the order in which they were to sit upon the platform, the class fell into line. The sidewalk cleared of a waiting crowd of unfortunates who had not the clothing or the invitation to enter the coveted portals, who yet had come to press back into the darkness and watch the spectacle.
As Mahala advanced up the broad walk that led to the front steps of the church, there came scuffling through the crowd, she could not have told from where, a figure in white, as white as the new-born thoughts of white that contributed to her own dress. She realized that there was a catching and a snatching, an effort to make some one pause, and then she saw, scurrying up the steps before her, standing in the broad light of the open doors of the church, her bonnet lost in the crowd, Rebecca, her white flag lifted above the path the graduating class must follow to enter the doors. The figures of two working men in their shirt sleeves, with rough jests on their lips and their hands outstretched, started forward.
Mahala looked up. Her first thought was that never in all her life had she seen a figure so appealingly beautiful. Probably no one in all that crowd, since the day of her self-imposed appearance with sheltered face as the bearer of the flag advocating purity, had seen Rebecca Sampson as she really was. The years untouched by mental strain had left her the lovely rounded face of girlhood. The deeply shadowing headpiece, always stiffly starched and filled in with sustaining slats of pasteboard, had kept Rebecca’s complexion that of a little child. Her hands and arms were soft and white. Her throat, delicately rounded, was a miracle of whiteness. The plain white dress that she wore was as mistily white as the petals of a cherry bloom. The fringed flag that she held in Mahala’s pathway was as white as her dress. Suddenly Mahala threw out her hands.
“Never mind!” she cried to the men. “Let her alone! I have been passing under her flag all my life.”
She smiled on the crowds pressing forward on either side of her.