In Bidwell, Tom Means, who later became a soldier and who has recently won high rank in the army because of his proficiency in training recruits for the World War, was the prize pupil in the schools. Tom was working for his appointment to West Point, and did not spend his evenings loafing on the streets, as did other young men. He stayed in his own house, intent on his studies. Tom’s father was a lawyer and his mother was third cousin to a Kentucky woman who had married an English baronet. The son aspired to be a soldier and a gentleman and to live on the intellectual plane, and had a good deal of contempt for the mental capacities of his fellow students, and when one of the Edgley family set up as his rival he was angry and embarrassed and the schoolroom was delighted. Day after day and year after year the contest between him and May Edgley went on and in a sense the whole town of Bidwell got back of the girl. In all such things as history and English literature Tom swept all before him but in spelling, arithmetic, and geography May defeated him without effort. At her desk she sat like a little terrier in the presence of a trap filled with rats. A question was asked or a problem in arithmetic put on the blackboard and like a terrier she jumped. Her hand went up and her sensitive mouth quivered. Fingers were snapped vigorously. “I know,” she said, and the entire class knew she did. When she had answered the question or had gone to the blackboard to solve the problem the half-grown children along the rows of benches laughed and Tom Means stared out through a window. May returned to her seat, half triumphant, half ashamed of her victory. The country lying west of Bidwell, like all the Ohio country down that way, is given to small fruit and berry raising, and in June and after school has been dismissed for the year all the younger men, boys, and girls, with most of the women of the town go to work in the fruit harvest. To the fields immediately after breakfast the citizens go trooping away. Lunches are carried in baskets and until the sun goes down everyone stays in the fields. And in the berry fields as in the schoolroom May was a notable figure. She did not walk or ride to the work with the other young girls, or join the parties at lunch at the noon hour, but everyone understood that that was because of her family. “I know how she feels, if I came from a family like that I wouldn’t ask or want other people’s attention,” said one of the women, the wife of a carpenter, who trudged along with the others in the dust of the road.