a sense of superiority at once exalted and humiliated her.  She said to herself that she was much finer and prettier than Lottie Sears, but that she ought to be thankful and not proud because she was.  She felt vain, but she was sorry because of her vanity.  She knew how charming her pink gingham gown was, but she knew that she ought to have asked her mother if she might wear it.  She knew that her mother would scold her—­she had a ready tongue—­and she realized that she would deserve it.  She had put on the pink gingham on account of Wollaston Lee, who was usually at prayer-meeting.  That, of course, she could not tell her mother.  There are some things too sacred for little girls to tell their mothers.  She wondered if Wollaston would ask leave to walk home with her.  She had seen a boy step out of a waiting file at the vestry door to a blushing girl, and had seen the girl, with a coy readiness, slip her hand into the waiting crook of his arm, and walk off, and she had wondered when such bliss would come to her.  It never had.  She wondered if the pink gingham might bring it to pass to-night.  The pink gingham was as the mating plumage of a bird.  All unconsciously she glanced sideways over the fall of lace-trimmed pink ruffles at her slender shoulders at Wollaston Lee.  He was gazing straight at Miss Slome, Miss Ida Slome, who was the school-teacher, and his young face wore an expression of devotion.  Maria’s eyes followed his; she did not dream of being jealous; Miss Slome seemed too incalculably old to her for that.  She was not so very old, in her early thirties, but the early thirties to a young girl are venerable.  Miss Ida Slome was called a beauty.  She, as well as Maria, wore a pink dress, at which Maria privately wondered.  The teacher seemed to her too old to wear pink.  She thought she ought wear black like her mother.  Miss Slome’s pink dress had knots of black velvet about it which accentuated it, even as Miss Slome’s face was accentuated by the clear darkness of her eyes and the black puff of her hair above her finely arched brows.  Her cheeks were of the sweetest red—­not pink but red—­which seemed a further tone of the pink of her attire, and she wore a hat encircled with a wreath of red roses.  Maria thought that she should have worn a bonnet.  Maria felt an odd sort of instinctive antagonism for her.  She wondered why Wollaston looked at the teacher so instead of at herself.  She gave her head a charming cant, and glanced again, but the boy still had his eyes fixed upon the elder woman, with that rapt expression which is seen only in the eyes of a boy upon an older woman, and which is primeval, involving the adoration and awe of womanhood itself.  The boy had not reached the age when he was capable of falling in love, but he had reached the age of adoration, and there was nothing in little Maria Edgham in her pink gingham, with her shy, sidelong glances, to excite it.  She was only a girl, the other was a goddess.  His worship of the teacher interfered with Wollaston’s