In a little house overlooking the fields on the far side of Waltonville, where Mrs. Margie Bent, of Waltonville's middle class, lived with her daughter Eleanor, preparations for Commencement were in progress. The house was pale gray in color, and had about its little porch a mass of pink climbing roses with dark foliage and thick clusters of bloom. Before it lay a smooth lawn, and back of it a tiny garden, symmetrically divided by grass paths. There were no outbuildings, there was no stick or weed; the little establishment looked like a playhouse or the model for an architect's picture. One did not ascribe to its inhabitants any academic aspirations.

Waltonville was accustomed to think of the little house as "back of" the town. Yet the town was in a truer sense back of the little gray house, which looked out upon a wide sweep of open country. Before it the fields dipped in a long and beautiful slope, then rose a few miles away to a low range of blue hills. A part of the land was cultivated, but there remained many stretches of woodland, especially along a wandering stream whose silver course could be followed for a long distance, and from which rose mist, now in thick, obscuring masses, now in transparent vapor. Beyond the low hills was another higher range. Here and there in the pleasant valley were farmhouses and large barns whose dimensions and design were copied from the barns of Lancaster County not many miles away.

Within the little house was the same clean prettiness. The furniture was simple and plain and there was a great deal of exquisite hand-sewing; hem-stitching on the white curtains, heavy initials on the linen, and beautiful embroidery on Eleanor's clothes in the closets. In the little parlor stood a bookcase filled with handsome and well-chosen books, and in the dining-room there were both bookcase and desk, the latter now neatly closed.

Little Mrs. Bent was helping her tall daughter into the Commencement dress which she had made with her own unresting hands. Her fair hair curled about her forehead, her short upper lip made her look like a little girl, and her whole appearance was at once attractive and pathetic. Mrs. Scott, whose inquisitive spirit made her wish to know every one in Waltonville by sight and as much about each person as she could discover, said of Mrs. Bent that she looked and acted like a lady, though she was none. Thomasina Davis, whose kindly spirit made her judge her acquaintances with sympathy, said that she believed that Mrs. Bent was a good woman who had suffered cruelly. Thomasina remembered her perfectly as Margie Ginter, the daughter of the most unpleasant, sodden, law-breaking tavern-keeper Waltonville had ever had, but did not think evil of her on that account. She knew that Margie had been light as thistledown, too easily pleased, too careless of the company she kept, entirely too free with her smiles, and a source of anxiety to the mothers of the young men of the town and to those who had the well-being of the college boys at heart; but she did not believe any of the serious accusations made against her by the older women; had not believed them when they were made and did not believe them now that they were occasionally recalled.

Margie had left Waltonville long ago with her father for another tavern in another State, and after a few years had returned with a married name and with a little girl whom she called "Nellie," and with means for very simple living. Whether her income had its source in the ill-gotten gains of her father or in the property of a deceased husband, or in some other less creditable source, Waltonville did not know. A few persons speculated about her when she returned, but she and her little daughter were soon accepted and ignored.

If there had been any one to compare Margie Ginter with Mrs. Bent, he would scarcely have believed her to be the same person. Margie Ginter had lived indifferently in a miserable tavern; Mrs. Bent conducted her little house with the most exquisite tidiness, and maintained therein the most perfect order. Her linens were less elegant than Mrs. Lister's, but they were no less beautifully laundered, no less elaborately marked. Margie had longed for constant company, and a succession of the most idle of pleasures; Mrs. Bent shrank even from the back-door calls of her neighbors. Margie had been confident, assured in all her motions, and almost impertinent in her glances at those whose disapproval she surmised; Mrs. Bent was humble, even frightened. Margie had never gone to church, but Mrs. Bent took a little side pew in the college church and sat there at each service. To Margie had come some mighty metamorphosis, changing her instincts, changing her very soul, as completely as a human body could have changed its position at a "Right-about face." The process had not been easy; it had written pathetic lines in the countenance which had once expressed only light-heartedness.

The tall daughter whom she was helping into her embroidered Commencement dress was as dark as her mother was fair and as direct of gaze as her mother was timid. Her gray eyes were singularly clear and bright; they held the glance so that her other features, beautiful as they were, became unimportant. Her other features, except her nose and her upper lip, were like her mother's; she had evidently a maternal inheritance, permeated and strengthened by a different strain.

She had not inherited, it was clear, from little Mrs. Bent the good mind which put her at the head of her class in college. Mrs. Bent was not a dull person, and she had certainly strength of will, but she had no aptitude for books even though she sat from time to time with one of Eleanor's volumes in her hand and listened for hours together while Eleanor read to her. Sometimes when her daughter was not about she looked in a puzzled, frightened way over what Eleanor had been reading, and she kept an old grammar hidden under a pile of neatly folded clothes in her bureau drawer.

Poor little Mrs. Bent made a brave effort to follow her swan in her flight. She had not, however, risen far, even in her effort to speak as others spoke. Her mistakes were those of a low stratum. Falling from her pretty lips in her youth and heard by uncritical ears, they had not seemed so dreadful. Now they were shocking. In her anxiety to do well, she sometimes formed new words upon the analogy of those which she knew.

"I thicken it with cream and I thinnen it with vinegar," she would say sweetly.

Sometimes a sudden "them there," long pruned from Eleanor's speech, slipped from her mother's tongue. "Them there" Mrs. Bent knew was execrable and was tortured by that knowledge.

Eleanor was now almost twenty years old, and seldom do twenty years flow with such smooth current. She could not remember when she had come to Waltonville to live, and she could recall distinctly only one incident in her life before she started to the village school. Children, in families where the past is frequently referred to, recall, or imagine that they recall, many incidents, but to Eleanor nothing was recalled.

The single incident which she remembered was impressed upon her by terror. Her mother and she were walking together upon a shady street when a man stopped them and spoke to them. "So you've come back, Margie!" was all that Eleanor could remember but the words remained in her mind. The man had laid his hand on her mother's arm, and Mrs. Bent had jerked away and had hurried down the street. Eleanor had seen the man a hundred times since, a heavy, dissipated creature named Bates who sat all day on the porch of the hotel.

When she went to school the teacher, a newcomer in Waltonville, asked her her father's name and she had stood bewildered.

"Her father is dead, I guess," said the little girl next to her.

Eleanor nodded solemnly. A day or two later, when the teacher's question came to her mind again, she repeated it to her mother. Mrs. Bent, whose experience had not prepared her for the questions of a first day in school, stared at her daughter.

"The teacher asked me, and a little girl said she guessed he was dead, and so I said he was dead. Was that right, mother?"

Mrs. Bent's face grew deathly pale, so that long afterwards the incident came back to Eleanor.

"Yes, that was right," said she.

Another problem suggested itself.

"Were we ever away from here?"

"Why do you ask that?"

"Because that man said, 'So you've come back.'"

Mrs. Bent shivered. "Yes, we were away from here once. Don't think of that man, and don't ever speak to him. If he comes toward you, you run, Nellie." Then Mrs. Bent took the little girl roughly by the arm. "Children should be seen and not heard—remember that!"

From Eleanor's first year in school a few vivid experiences remained. Racing home, she had fallen and had cut her head and several stitches had to be put in under her thick hair. A neighbor, running for the old doctor, had returned with the newcomer, Dr. Green, who had dismissed the spectators and had hurt her terribly. Then he had carried her to bed, where she slept for a long time and waked with a burning pain in her head, the first pain she had ever had.

When he came the next day, she was better and he had sat by her bed for a long time, asking her question after question about her lessons. He spoke in a stern, fierce tone, as though nothing about her education or about the world pleased him. He corrected savagely her inherited errors in speech as though he could re-make her language in a morning. Her eyes closed in the middle of a sentence, and when she woke he was no longer in the room. But it seemed to her that a voice was still about, going on and on and on. Another excited voice made answer after a long time, "I ain't a-goin' to do it!" If it was Dr. Green's voice and if it was to Mrs. Bent that he was speaking, their knowledge of one another had advanced far beyond the stage of casual acquaintance. Their dialogue was not a conversation, but a quarrel.

The next day, when Eleanor sat up against the pillows, Dr. Green brought her a book. He had written "Eleanor" on the fly-leaf.

"Nellie is a nonsensical name," he declared. "It must be changed."

Eleanor looked at her mother.

"I don't care," said Mrs. Bent. If Eleanor had been dragged from the grave instead of suffering a small scalp wound, she could have been no more terrified. Her face was tear-stained, her color was gone, and one hand closed and opened constantly upon the other. In her eyes shone not only anguish, but a fierce anger. She seemed to take little pleasure in this friend of her youth.

The picture book was the first of a long series of books which appeared in the little house. First came story-books, wonder-tales, fairy-tales, "Robinson Crusoe," "Swiss Family Robinson," then a set of Scott, then poetry. Presently a bookcase had to be bought, then another.

She was allowed to go henceforth to Dr. Green's untidy office, or, at least, her mother did not reprove her when she came late from school because Dr. Green had called to her to stop, or to climb into his buggy and go with him into the country. She had ceased to be afraid of him; once or twice she ventured a shy touch of hand. There was a need in little Eleanor's soul which he supplied, a precocious intellectual curiosity which was now wakening. Presently she began to ask questions and Dr. Green answered them. Curt and positive as he was with others, he never was curt with her. He sometimes examined her to see what she had retained, and smiled to himself over the success of his teachings. Eleanor had gained all unconsciously a knowledge far superior to that of Cora Scott or even to that of Richard Lister. Neither Dr. Scott nor Dr. Lister talked to their offspring about world politics, about the literature of their own country and all others, about the trees by the wayside and the stars in the heavens as Dr. Green talked to little Eleanor Bent. It was when she repeated at home, as nearly as she could in his language, all his wisdom, that Mrs. Bent took to studying her grammar in the evenings, after Eleanor had gone to bed, and hiding it under her pillow.

Eleanor was deeply impressed by what she read and was also acutely conscious of the world about her. She had vivid impressions of each detail of the landscape before the door; of the smooth, concave fields rising to the blue hills, which rose in turn to mountains of paler blue; of the winding stream with its accompanying mists; of the journeying sun with its single moment of rest through all the year in a deep cradle in the southwestern ridge; of the distant, dim sound of the train which made its way along the next valley with rhythmic thunder; of the peace of quiet afternoons and evenings; of the changing light.

She had not yet, though she was graduating from college, begun to observe or to understand the sorrows or sufferings of human beings or the strange complexities and thwartings of human life. She lived within herself without speculating about other people, even about the life so close to her, to which she was so thoroughly accustomed that its shrinking, its various and inconsistent characteristics, did not seem strange to her. In her eighth year she followed to the cemetery the funeral of the father of one of her schoolmates, and saw from a distance his widow throw herself upon his coffin. She pictured thenceforth her mother in the same situation and regarded her with tender awe.

In only one respect did she fear her mother. The dreadful "them there" was pruned out of her own speech by Dr. Green's continued admonitions and, having learned her lesson, she proceeded to pass it on.

"Mother, you must not say 'them there.' Dr. Green says that it is outlandish talk."

Mrs. Bent rose from her place at one side of the little table. Her eyes looked no more wild when Eleanor was brought home to her bleeding.

"Don't you dare to tell your mother how to talk! That is a dreadful sin, a dreadful, dreadful sin!"

Eleanor burst into tears; her mother did not stay to comfort her, but went upstairs to her room and there remained until Eleanor started to school. Eleanor heard her talking to herself, heard her pacing back and forth, and did not dare to go to her. It was only after many days that their old pleasant relations were restored.

Eleanor and her mother went nowhere to pay social visits and few persons came into their little house. They were so situated with reference to their nearest neighbors that either the making of a long journey or the scaling of a sharp picket fence was a necessary preliminary to the borrowing of a lemon or a recipe. The nearest neighbor, who often needed lemons, had suggested a gate through the common fence, but it had never been cut.

The successive pastors of the college church came at proper intervals to call. There were no aid societies or "Busy Bees" in the church government, and the young people were not drawn into association by oyster suppers or similar entertainments. Nor was Mrs. Bent drawn into the company of the older women. Mrs. Scott, whose pew was near by, walked with her once or twice a year to the corner and had always some impertinent inquiry to make. Only a week ago she had asked about Eleanor's future.

"Nursing, perhaps, Mrs. Bent? Young women are taking up nursing."

A person with a sharper tongue than Mrs. Bent's might have asked whether Cora meant to take up nursing. But Mrs. Bent said, with her gentle, frightened air, "Oh, I think not!"

"Then, teaching, perhaps?"

"She hasn't said anything yet about teaching."

"Fit her for something, Mrs. Bent. I suppose she will have to earn her living?"

Mrs. Bent smiled and passed on, not seeming to realize that Mrs. Scott's last sentence was a question. Mrs. Scott was still talking. She said, in conclusion, that she had great difficulty in finding maids; that colored girls were almost worse than nobody and that white girls had wrong and proud notions. If she meant to imply that Eleanor had wrong or proud notions, Mrs. Bent did not understand. If she had a "place" in Waltonville society, she knew, alas! where that place was.

If Mrs. Scott had suspected the ambitions which filled the mind of pretty Eleanor, she would have run after Mrs. Bent. Eleanor had become inspired with a desire to write, an ambition put into her head by Dr. Green, and zealously cultivated by him, and she had got into shape, without telling any one but her mother, several stories which were not without merit. One she had ventured to send away and to-day the excitement of graduation was dulled by the approach of a more important event. The editor of "Willard's Magazine" to which she had sent "Professor Ellenborough's Last Class" had written to say that a representative of that magazine would call upon her in the course of the week. It was improbable that they would send a messenger from New York to distant and inaccessible Waltonville unless her story was really to be accepted! Yet acceptance was outside the bounds of possibility.

"I shouldn't eat or sleep for a week," she declared as the embroidered Commencement dress went over her head and her white shoulders.

Mrs. Bent looked up at her with her most frightened expression. Her duckling had proved to be a swan—there was no doubt of that.

"Don't set yourself on it," she said, remembering sundry very different disappointments of her own. "Things often don't turn out like we want they should."

Mrs. Bent's hands trembled; she would have given her life to have things turn out the way Eleanor wanted they should. Even now there was another happiness approaching, of which Eleanor knew nothing. Going one day to Thomasina's house, Mrs. Bent had asked Thomasina to do a service for her and Eleanor.

"I don't like to put you to trouble," she explained nervously. "I want to sell my piano."

"Yes?" said Thomasina. Was poor little Mrs. Bent in financial difficulties? It would be a great pity if Eleanor had to discontinue her lessons. "That is, not exactly to sell it, but to change it."

"Yes," said Thomasina, who never interrupted or tried to complete the sentences of other persons.

"For a better one."

"Yes." Thomasina saw that her guess was wrong.

"But I don't know much about—about such things." Mrs. Bent had meant to say about pianos, but she suddenly could not remember whether the i was long or short. She knew that one or the other was very wrong, but she could not remember which she had used a moment ago.

"I'll be very glad to help you."

Mrs. Bent's relief showed on her face and she breathed a long sigh.

"What kind of piano do you want, Mrs. Bent?"

"A large one," answered Mrs. Bent, knowing now certainly that she had the wrong word.

"A grand piano?"

"That is it, exactly."

Thomasina hazarded the name of the best by way of elimination.

"That is it," said Mrs. Bent. "If you will pick it out when you go to the city, the money part will be fixed. It is a Commencement present to her."

Mrs. Bent rose to go. She was invited to stay longer, and she would have liked to sit forever in the pleasant room, but she was afraid. When she had gone, Thomasina stood for a moment frowning, then bit her lip. She wondered a good deal about Mrs. Bent, and she was to wonder still more when she saw the large check in the hand of the salesman in Baltimore from whose stock she selected the finest piano. Not only the amount, but the signature of the check astonished her.

The piano, now at the railroad station upon its side, its shining rosewood swathed in many folds of flannel and canvas and rubber, was to be delivered while Eleanor was at Commencement. If she had dreamed of its presence, her cheeks would have been still redder, her shining eyes still happier. She laid her black gown over her arm and took her black cap by its tassel.

"Get your bonnet, mother."

A glance at the clock frightened Mrs. Bent. Eleanor should be off at once or she would meet the men with the piano. Mrs. Bent had given explicit charges as to the time of its delivery. She was to let the carriers, whose chief she knew to be trustworthy, into the house before she started.

"I'm not ready yet. You go quick, and I'll come right away."

"You'll surely wait for me afterwards?"

"Oh, yes."

She followed Eleanor to the door, and watched her pass the corner. The emotion which shone from her eyes was sufficiently intense to explain even a greater metamorphosis than that which had changed Margie Ginter into Mrs. Bent.

Almost at once the piano, towering high above the horses which drew it, lumbered in from the other direction. All had turned out well.