“What do you think, Andrew?” she said. “What do you s'pose has happened? Guess.” Andrew laughed gratefully, and with the greatest alacrity. Surely this was nothing about mining-stocks, unless, indeed, she had heard, and the stocks had gone up, but that seemed to much like the millennium. He dismissed that from his mind before it entered. He stood before her in his worn clothes. He always wore a collar and a black tie, and his haggard face was carefully shaven. Andrew was punctiliously neat, on Ellen's account. He was always thinking, suppose he should meet Ellen coming home from school, with some young ladies whose fathers were rich and did not have to work in the shop, how mortified she might feel if he looked shabby and unkempt.
“Guess, Andrew,” she said.
“What is it?” said Andrew.
“Oh, you guess.”
“I don't see what it can be, Fanny.”
“Well, Ellen has got the valedictory. What's the matter with you? Be you deaf? Ellen has got the valedictory out of all them girls and boys.”
“She has, has she?” said Andrew. He dropped into a chair and looked at his wife. There was something about the intense interchange of confidence of delight between these two faces of father and mother which had almost the unrestraint of lunacy. Andrew's jaw fairly dropped with his smile, which was a silent laugh rather than a smile; his eyes were wild with delight. “She has, has she?” he kept repeating.
“Yes, she has,” said Fanny. She tossed her head with an incomparable pride; she coughed a little, affected cough. “I s'pose you know what a compliment it is?” said she. “It means that she's smarter than all them boys and girls—the smartest one in her whole class.”
“Yes, I s'pose it does,” said Andrew. “So she has got it! Well!”
“There she comes now,” said Fanny, “and Grandma Brewster.”