Marm Lisa by Kate Douglas Wiggin

MRS. GRUBB'S interest in the education of the defective classes was as short-lived as it was ardent. One interview with the president of the society convinced her that he was not a person to be ‘helped' according to her understanding of the term. She thought him a self-sufficient gentleman, inflexible in demeanour, and inhospitable to anybody's ideas or anybody's hobbies but his own. She resented his praise of Mistress Mary and Rhoda, and regarded it fulsome flattery when he alluded to their experiment with Marm Lisa as one of the most interesting and valuable in his whole experience; saying that he hardly knew which to admire and venerate the more-the genius of the teachers, or the devotion, courage, and docility of the pupil.

In the summer months Lisa had gone to the country with Mistress Mary and Edith, who were determined never to lose sight of her until the end they sought was actually attained. There, in the verdant freshness of that new world, Lisa experienced a strange exaltation of the senses. Every wooded path unfolded treasures of leafy bud, blossom, and brier, and of beautiful winged things that crept and rustled among the grasses. There was the ever new surprise of the first wild-flowers, the abounding mystery of the bird's note and the brook's song, the daily greeting of bees and butterflies, frogs and fishes, field-mice and squirrels; so that the universe, which in the dead past had been dreary and without meaning, suddenly became warm and friendly, and she, the alien, felt a sense of kinship with all created things.