Cordelia; "she is keeping
the home for him. She is happy." And Aunt Cordelia took Emmy Lou's
hand.

That very afternoon Aunt Louise began to help Emmy Lou with her lessons,
and Aunt Cordelia went around and asked Hattie's mother to let Hattie
come and get her lessons with Emmy Lou.

And at school Dear Teacher, walking up and down the aisles, would stop,
and her fingers would close over and guide the labouring digits of Emmy
Lou, striving to copy within certain ruled lines upon her slate the
writing on the blackboard:

The pen is the tongue of the mind.

Emmy Lou began to learn. As weeks went by, now and then Emmy Lou bobbed
up a place, although, sooner or later, she slipped back. She was not
always at the foot.

But no one, not even Dear Teacher, who understood so much, realised one
thing. The day after a lesson, Emmy Lou knew it. On the day it was
recited, Emmy Lou had lacked sufficient time to grasp it.

With ten words in the spelling lesson, Emmy Lou listened, letter by
letter, to those ten droned out five times down the line, then twice
again around the class of fifty. Then Emmy Lou, having already laboured
faithfully over it, knew her spelling lesson.

And at home, it was Emmy Lou's joy to gather her doll children in line,
and giving out past lessons, recite them in turn for her children. And
so did Emmy Lou know by heart her Second Reader as far as she had gone;
she often gave the lesson with her book upside down. And an old and
battered doll, dearest to Emmy Lou's heart, was always head, and Hattie,
the newest doll, was next. Even the Emmy Lous must square with Fate
somehow.

Along in the year a new feature was introduced in the Second Reader. The
Second Reader was to have a Medal. Dear Teacher did not seem
enthusiastic. She seemed to dread tears. But it was decreed that the
school was to use medals.

At recess Emmy Lou asked Hattie what a medal was. The big Fourth and
Fifth Reader girls were playing games from which the little girls were
excluded, for the school was large and the yard was small. At one time
it had seemed to Emmy Lou that the odium, the obloquy, the reproach of
being a little girl was more than she could bear, but she would not
change places with anyone, now she was a nintimate friend.

Emmy Lou asked Hattie what it was--this medal.

Hattie explained. Hattie knew everything. A medal was--well--a medal. It
hung on a blue ribbon. Each little girl brought her own blue ribbon. You