“Do you think I have enough manners, Aunt Kate?”
“Why, dearie, you’ve done wonders in these three months, and I’m going to send you to Pelham Towers as a day pupil. You’ll meet little girls there with good manners and it will help you. How are you in your studies? Do you like books?”
“I just love ’em, Aunt Kate, and I took two prizes last winter term. Then Pa wouldn’t let me go any more. He said if I could take prizes I knew enough. I felt awful, at first. But I guess Ma did need me. She was took—taken—sick pretty soon, and she never did get well any more.”
“Betsy dear, I’m sure it was best for you to help your mother, and what you did will help make you the fine woman you are going to be some day. But there’s nothing now to hinder you from learning as fast as you like.”
So Betsy began, and after the first day she came home looking very thoughtful.
“Well, how does school seem to you? What’s on your mind, Betsy?”
“It’s all right, I guess,” she said slowly. “But—Aunt Kate, it’s like it is at Sunday School. My clothes are as nice and nicer than most, but—I heard one girl tell another one—they thought I wasn’t hearin’—that I was ‘country’.”
“Never mind them, Betsy. How about your lessons?”
“Well, Auntie, I was all kinds. Grammar,—” Betsy smiled up sidewise at her Aunt,—“grammar,—I’m not much; geography,—I’m in the top class; ’rithmetic,—I’m top in that, too; reading,—Miss Pelham says I have a good voice, but I need a lot of trainin’; and nature study,—Aunt Kate, I don’t know the names of things, but I know more about bugs and worms and garden sass and wild flowers than the whole school. And oh, Aunt Kate, I’m going to learn the name of everything there is on earth.”
“Good girl! That’s the right road to travel.”