“After one has learned to smile out one's eyes,
a dividing line of aisle is soon bridged."
Miss Amanda meant to be funny. Emily Louise, for one, looked stonily ahead; not for anything would she smile.
But the weekly recitation varied, and there came a week when the classes were assembled for a lesson in composition.
Mr. Page laughed at what he called flowery effusions. “Use the matter and life about you,” he said.
“There is one boy,” he went on to state, “whose compositions are generally good for that reason. William, step up, sir, and let us hear what you have made of this.”
William arose. He was still square, but he was no longer short; there was a straight and handsome bridge building to his nose, and he had taken to tall collars. William’s face was somewhat suffused at this summons to publicity, but his smile was cheerful and unabashed. His composition was on “Conscience.” So were the compositions of the others; but his was different.
“A boy has one kind of a conscience,” read William, “and a girl has another kind. Two girls met a cow. ‘Look her right in the face and pretend like we aren’t afraid,’ said the biggest girl; but the littlest girl had a conscience. ‘Won’t it be deceiving the cow?’ she wanted to know.”
Emily Louise blushed; how could William! For Emily Louise was “the littlest girl;” Hattie was the other, and William had come along and driven the cow away.
William was still reading: “There was a girl found a quarter in the snow. She thought how it would buy five pies, or ten doughnuts, or fifteen pickles, and then she thought about the person who would come back and find the place in the snow and no quarter, and so she went and put the quarter back.”