ccupied
with resenting the young teacher's feeling of vast superiority that she
failed to understand, as did the Farnshaw child, that along with all that
vainglorious assumption went a real knowledge of some things with which it
was valuable to become acquainted.

To the spiteful Crane child the schoolma'am was "stuck-up," while to the
imaginative daughter of the Farnshaw house she was a bird of paradise, and
though Lizzie was conscious that the teacher's voice was harsh, and her
air affected, the child reached out like a drowning man toward this symbol
of the life she coveted. To her the new teacher was a gift from heaven
itself.

This young girl from Topeka brought into activity every faculty the
sensitive, ambitious child possessed.

Lizzie Farnshaw laid hold, with a strong hand, upon every blessing which
came in her way. She knew that the foppish young thing at the teacher's
desk was "stuck-up," but Lizzie was willing that she should be whatever
she chose, so long as it was possible to live near her, to study her, and
to become like the best that was in her.

The teacher's matter-of-fact assumption that no self-respecting person
failed to obtain a high-school education was a good thing for the country
girl, however overdrawn it might be. Lizzie Farnshaw listened and built
air-castles. To this one child, out of that entire community, the idea
appealed alluringly. But for her castles in Spain she must have burst with
her unexpressed desires. To add fuel to the fires of her fancy, Mr.
Farnshaw also fell under the fascinations of the school teacher and
boasted in the bosom of his family that "Lizzie's just as smart as that
Topeka girl any day," and when his daughter began to talk hopefully about
teaching school it appealed to the father's pride, and he encouraged her
dreams. He had been the leading man in the community since coming to
Kansas because of the number of cattle he had been able to accumulate. A
small legacy had aided in that accumulation, and it appealed to his pride
to have his daughter's intellectual ambitions adding to the general family
importance. Pride is an important factor in the lives of all, but to the
children of the farm it is an ambrosia, which once sipped is never
forgotten and to obtain which many strange sacrifices will be made. Mr.
Farnshaw usually regarded a request from his children as a thing to be
denied promptly, and always as a matter for suspicion. Yet here he was,
considering sob