Free Girl Sleuth by Melanie Rehak

that she could at least have the company of other children for the final month of the school year. This idea seemed a fine one until Mildred learned that because of her age, and because she’d had only a month of schooling, she would not be moving on to the next grade with her classmates. She was highly distressed and, never one to be left behind in any sense of the word, in the coming years twice made up for the repetition, first by going through high school in three years and then by completing college in the three years after that. She graduated from the University of Iowa just a month or so shy of her twenty-first birthday.
    Always, there was one thing on Mildred’s mind. “I . . . wanted to be a writer from the time I could walk. I had no other thought except that I would write.” In keeping with her lifelong belief that writing was essentially a self-taught skill, she toiled alone on her efforts. Her parents never read what she was working on, even when she was a young girl, but they did provide two very valuable commodities: “My mother always encouraged me to keep writing and my father provided the stamps.” As she hung around the post office waiting to see if any of her submissions to magazines would come back with an acceptance attached to them, Mildred used the spare time to compose and mail fan letters to her favorite movie star, Lillian Gish.
    Just before her fourteenth birthday, her unshakable faith in herself—not to mention her indiscriminate use of her father’s stamps—was rewarded. In the June 1919 issue of her beloved
St. Nicholas
magazine, emblazoned with the Silver Badge Award, appeared a very short story by Mildred Augustine titled “The Courtesy.” She had been entering the magazine’s contests for several years already, and at last she had been recognized. Though
St. Nicholas
did not award any cash, the venerable magazine gave the young author her first taste of the thrill of publication, much as it had the infamous poet Edna St. Vincent Millay, who as a child had published her first poems in
St. Nicholas
roughly a decade earlier.
    The page announcing Mildred’s success opened, as usual, with an editor’s note that featured an illustration by a child at the top. It showed a graduate and a bride, and had been created by a fifteen-year-old contributor to the magazine. In the note beneath, the anonymous writer extolled it as “a fitting introduction to the month of roses, and weddings, and glad (or tearful) farewells to school or college!” And then came something a bit different. “The Courtesy” was a tiny fable about the merits of good behavior and the golden rule with just a touch of the
Lord of the Flies
about it:
    Â 
Mrs. Gardner sat gazing out of the window. In her lap lay a letter. The door opened and her daughter Andrea entered the room. Mrs. Gardner, smiling faintly, said, “I have received a letter from Aunt Jane, who will arrive next week to spend the winter with us.” For a moment Andrea was too surprised to speak. Then she burst into tears.
A week later Aunt Jane arrived, parrot, umbrella, baggage and all. She was even worse than Andrea had imagined. She breakfasted in bed, grumbled at everything, was courteous to no one, and was, in short, as Andrea declared, “a perfect grouch.”
As time passed, matters grew worse. The parrot screeched incessantly, and the house was in a constant uproar.
Several weeks after her arrival, Aunt Jane overheard a conversation that caused her much thought. Coming noiselessly past Andrea’s room, she heard Andrea clearly say: “Aunt Jane thinks that we should do nothing but wait on her and show her every courtesy, while she just bosses and grumbles. For my part, I think that courtesy is as much her duty as ours. If only she were pleasant, it would be much easier for us to be courteous to her.”
Aunt Jane silently entered her room. Next morning the Gardners