Page:George Weston--The apple-tree girl.djvu/51

 it "the day after graduation, and it came to her (as such things generally do) in a way she had never expected. In their evening exercises some of the members of the graduating class gave a one-act play, and it won't take you long to guess that Margaret was the heroine. It is doubtful if she ever looked prettier in her life than she looked that night; and, because she was the acknowledged belle of Penfield and everyone felt proud of her (none of them knowing her half so well as her cousin Charlotte did), she was enthusiastically applauded. The next day her picture appeared in the "Penfield Journal," a two-column wide cut with a half-column notice, while Charlotte's name only appeared once, in a short sentence stating that she had graduated at the head of her class.

Poor Charlotte! A weaker character might have asked the despairing question: "What's the use of being smart?" After the performance the night before