New Chronicles of Rebecca by Kate Douglas Wiggin

This was boy and girl love, calf love, perhaps, though even that may develop into something larger, truer, and finer; but not so far away were other and very different hearts growing and budding, each in its own way. There was little Miss Dearborn, the pretty school teacher, drifting into a foolish alliance because she did not agree with her stepmother at home; there was Herbert Dunn, valedictorian of his class, dazzled by Huldah Meserve, who like a glowworm "shone afar off bright, but looked at near, had neither heat nor light."

There was sweet Emily Maxwell, less than thirty still, with most of her heart bestowed in the wrong quarter. She was toiling on at the Wareham school, living as unselfish a life as a nun in a convent; lavishing the mind and soul of her, the heart and body of her, on her chosen work. How many women give themselves thus, consciously and unconsciously; and, though they themselves miss the joys and compensations of mothering their own little twos and threes, God must be grateful to them for their mothering of the hundreds which make them so precious in His regenerating purposes.