Mary Lyon stared, as if both he and his daughter had suddenly taken leave of their senses.
“Why, what can the lassie do?” she cried; “I thought you were making her nothing but a don in the dead languages!”
“I can bake, and brew, and wash, and keep a house clean,” said Agnes Anne, putting in her testimonials, since there was no one so well acquainted with them. My father nodded. He was not so blind as many might suppose. My mother said, “Aye, ’deed, she can that. Agnes Anne is a good lass. I know not what I should do without her!”
My grandmother looked about at the new air of tidiness, and for the first time a suspicion crossed her mind that, out of a pit from which she was expecting no such treasure, some one in her own image might possibly have been digged among her descendants of the second generation. She looked at Agnes Anne with a ray of hope. Agnes Anne stood the awful searching power of that eye. Agnes Anne did not flinch. Mary Lyon nodded her head with its man’s close-cropped locks of rough white hair in lyart locks about her ears.
“You’ll do, Agnes Anne, you’ll do,” she said, adding cautiously, “that is, after a time”—so as not to exalt the girl above measure. It was, however, recognized by all as a definite triumph for my sister. My grandmother, a rigid Calvinist, who believed in Election with all her intellect, and acted Free Will with all her heart, elected Agnes Anne upon the spot. Had the girl not willed to rise out of the pit of sloth and mere human learning? And lo! she had arisen. Thenceforth Agnes Anne stood on a pedestal, and for a while one sturdy disciple of Calvin’s thought heretically of the pure doctrine. Here was a human being who had willed, and, according to my grandmother, had made of herself a miracle of grace.
But she recalled herself to more orthodox sentiments. The steel was out of the sheath, indeed, but it had to be tried. Even yet Agnes Anne might be found wanting.
“When will you be ready to start?” she said, turning her black twinkling eyes upon her granddaughter.
“In five minutes,” said Agnes Anne boldly.
“And you are not frightened?”
“Of what?”