"Neither was I," said Miss Emma good-humoredly if unexpectedly. "I graduated through our high school, myself, the second class put through after it was established. And looking back in the light of what I've found out since, I'll say there don't seem to be anything in the way of real, actual, everyday sense that a body ought to have, that I didn't succeed in failing to have—I and most of my class."
"Why, Emma," from Auntie, "and you had the leading honor, what is it that it's called, the valedictory?"
"That's the surest and most damning evidence against me, Miss Ann Eliza; it takes years to live it down," continued Miss Emma. "I thought about you in church Sunday, Selina, wondering if you'd do, and then went and asked Mrs. Williams about you, knowing you'd taught there. She said you did fairly well with your little class, and toward the end of the year seemed to be doing better, but as you told her you were going South to coach in Latin and Algebra, she judged these were your specialties. Well, they're mine, too, where I'm likeliest to fall down, and that decided me."
Do our assumptions, then, like our sins, live on to confront us? "But there was no coaching to do when I got there," hurriedly explained Selina. "I never had a pupil!"
"Well, that don't prevent its being your specialty even so. I'm the one to risk it. And I'll have to say what convinced me there's something to you, is that you stood Mrs. Williams and her condescension all those months you were in her house and didn't murder her. I have to swallow a good deal of such patronage anyhow, because I'm poor, or because I work, or both, and I'm guiltless of violence only because I can't hope to commit assault and battery on people's persons and not pay the penalty. But it never would do to tempt me too far with that woman. But to get back to the point, are you going to undertake me?"
Try as Selina would, she didn't seem to know how to get out of it. She endeavored to throw some cordiality into her manner. "We'll begin whenever you say, Miss Emma. Have you those questions with you, you spoke about? We might go over them and see what there is to do."
Auntie got up to leave them. "Thank you for remembering your missionary dues, Emma. You're an amazing person to me. If I was forty instead of forty-eight," longingly, "I'd certainly follow your example."