Free Up a Road Slowly by Irene Hunt

entrance examinations.
    She had only a high school education herself, but she had been an excellent student, and she was a natural teacher. She carried loads of her own books to school, and she and young Eltwing mapped out a course of study that would have overwhelmed two youngsters of less enthusiasm and determination.
    It was soon apparent to Aunt Cordelia that she had excellent material with which to work. Jonathan Eltwing had high intelligence and a motivation that drove him to attack with fury the piles of work she laid out for him. She was delighted when he soon overtook her in mathematics and the natural sciences; she guided his reading in history, in American and English literature, and in spite of an occasional groan from him, she made him learn a little Latin and considerable English grammar and rhetoric.
    They worked together early of a morning before school, and then during the day while Aunt Cordelia taught younger pupils, Jonathan Eltwing sat at a desk in the back of the room and labored at the pile of work his young teacher had assigned to him. In the late afternoon, following the dismissal of the other children, they worked again, sometimes until the winter twilight drove them home.
    Of course, tongues began to wag in hopeful suspicion that youthful immorality was afoot in the small schoolhouse, and one evening Aunt Cordelia had word that the directors of the school planned to visit her the following morning.
    My grandfather seems to have had perfect confidence in his daughter and pride in what she was doing for Jonathan Eltwing. Grim, tight-lipped old Amos Bishop went with Aunt Cordelia to school that morning, and while she and Jonathan stood on either side of him, gave the school fathers a stern dressing-down. However, after that scene, Aunt Cordelia always kept my mother, a child of eight or ten, with her after school hours. Laura told me the story of how Mother would sit reading in the back of the room from four until five or later, a patient little chaperone guarding the good name of her sister.
    Whether the two had fallen in love that winter, no one ever quite knew. Laura said that Mother thought they did. She remembered looks that passed between them, and clasped hands that were quickly unclasped; she remembered too, that on the night before Jonathan left for college she had seen two shadowy figures standing close together in the dusky woods beyond her window. She remembered that many letters came for a while, that finally they came much more rarely, that Aunt Cordelia became less pretty, with a tightened mouth and a stiffer air. She never had another “beau” and by the time she was twenty, people were speaking of her as “the old-maid school teacher.”
    Jonathan Eltwing took advanced degrees, performed brilliantly in the various universities he attended, became an authority on Russian literature, and married a delicate girl with large, brilliant eyes and a passion for music.
    Through the years he had never returned to the community until the autumn which I remember. His mother had joined him as soon as he was able to support her; the father had died, never seeing or even asking about his oldest son until a few days before his death when he had inquired of a neighbor if the man knew what “this Phi Beta Kappa business was all about.” He had read in the local paper that it was something that had happened to Jonathan.
    One day in the fall of my twelfth year, Father called Aunt Cordelia, and I remember that her face flushed and then grew pale as she stood at the old-fashioned telephone anchored against the dining room wall. I heard her say, “Why, of course, Adam; I’d like very much to see Jonathan again and to meet Mrs. Eltwing. Why don’t you bring them out Saturday, say, at three in the afternoon?”
    She was quite calm and matter-of-fact when she turned away from the telephone. “Your father tells me that Dr. Jonathan Eltwing is buying the old Meridan place