Dora's New York visit colored all the next five years that she worked and waited for college. Her interest in the electric light never wavered for an instant. Like many another, she marveled at the thoroughness of Mr. Edison's search for the right sort of filament and followed expectantly reports of those men whom he sent around the world in search of it.
She read with a bit of almost personal pride the item in the Portland paper that told how, on September 4, 1882, at three o'clock in the afternoon, electric light was supplied for the first time to a number of New York customers; and when, in 1884, that same paper stated that at Brockton, Massachusetts, the first theater ever lighted by electricity from a central plant had been thrown open, she wrote her uncle:
"I'm sure you'll have to discharge your lamp trimmer pretty soon. But I don't care now, for with father's help, I think I can enter Wellesley in the fall. Of course I hope to work one more summer for you."
Uncle John answered that letter in person, for he needed to go to Maine to make arrangements for the summer.
"I congratulate you, Dora," said he. "You deserve a college course. But I shan't discharge you yet. I expect now to wire the hotel by 1889; but even if I shouldn't need a lamp trimmer all the time till then, I shall always be glad of a capable waitress.—Will you work for me the next three summers?"
"Of course I will, Uncle John," replied Dora as eagerly and gratefully as she had made the same reply six years before. "With the money I can earn the next three summers, I can lessen college expenses a good deal."
So it happened that the ambition of Dora's girlhood; largely through her own pluck and persistence, was realized in due season. Still, she always felt that Mr. Edison unknowingly had a large share in the making of her career; for when in after years she became an instructor in physics at an influential school, she could easily trace back her love for her subject to her interest in the early experiments upon the electric light.