The Little Colonel: Maid of Honor

It was a compliment that changed the entire course of Mary's summer; a / compliment which Betty gleefully repeated to her, imitating the old / Colonel's very tone, as he gesticulated emphatically to Mr. Sherman:

"I tell you, Jack, she's the most remarkable child of her age I ever / met. It is wonderful the information she has managed to pick up in that / God-forsaken desert country. I say to you, sir, she can tell you as much / now about scientific bee-culture as any naturalist you ever knew. / Actually quoted Huber to me the other day, and Maeterlinck's 'Life of / the Bee!' Think of a fourteen-year-old girl quoting Maeterlinck! With / the proper direction in her reading, she need never see the inside of a / college, for her gift of observation amounts to a talent, and she has it / in her to make herself not only an honor to her sex, but one of the most / interesting women of her generation."