# The Apple-Tree Girl/Chapter 3
### CHAPTER III

The morning after Charlotte set herself those Three Great Sums she found that a feeling of reaction had followed the excitement of the night before. "Oh, I never, never could!" she told herself in a frightened voice. "I would only be a silly thing to try."
The more she thought it over the more she felt that way. And, truth to tell, her Three Great Sums were certainly formidable enough, even for a girl who had been graduated at the head of her class. "I might be able to get some folks to like me," she thought, "though I've never been able to make friends yet. And I might be able to get my picture in some of the papers, if I did something awful enough! But to make everybody like me—and have my picture in all the papers—and then on ​top of that to marry one of the handsomest and richest young men in the whole United States!" With something of a gasp she slipped out of bed and looked at her reflection in the mirror. "If I wasn't such a plain little thing!" she almost cried. "But—oh, dear!—perhaps the books are right after all, and a heroine's got to be beautiful."
Still, as you have seen, it wasn't for nothing that Charlotte had the old Marlin spirit and had been raised, as a body might say, right under the shadow of Micah's apple tree; and after she had appraised the hardness of her problem it gradually began to lose some of its terrors.
"Of course, anybody can do the easy sums," she thoughtfully reflected, "and, of course, somebody's got to marry him—I don't care who he is!"
So, as she dressed herself, she began to study her problem in a most delightful manner, at one moment reasoning ​with the power of a logician whose geometry papers had always been marked with an "A," and at the next reasoning with the sublime innocence of a country girl who had never been more than nine miles away from the farm where she was born.
"After all," she thought, "women have solved harder problems than mine. Think of Mrs. Browning, who made herself as famous as her husband; and think of Madame Curie, who discovered radium—and Helen Keller, who was deaf, dumb and blind! And think of the first woman lawyer and the first woman doctor—what sums they set themselves! So, after all," she repeated, "I don't see why I need be frightened—even at—even at—even at marrying a millionaire!"
She blushed at that, and began brushing her hair so hard that it crackled.
"It'll be like algebra, or French, or ​German," she thought. "If you look at the end of the textbook first, you think to yourself, 'I could never learn this'! But if you do a little every day, starting at the front of the book and working up step by step, why, it all comes just as easy!"
At that she felt so confident that she coiled her hair into a queenly little bob, and began to search her bureau drawer. There she found a tiny memorandum book bound in purple morocco, a Christmas present which someone had given her years before. Next she found a pencil, and then she wrote her first Great Sum on the first page of the purple book:
"One—How can I make everybody like me?"
Turning the page over she sat for a long time, nibbling the end of her pencil.
"Of course," she thought, "to get my picture in all the papers I shall have ​to do something to make myself famous. So that's really the next sum," and she wrote:
"Two—How can I make myself famous?"
The next proposition needed no reflection at all, and down it went straightway:
"Three—How can I marry a millionaire?"
"I'll start on the first," she said, "because that's the easiest." And, hurriedly turning back to the first page, she repeated to herself over and over again: "How can I make everybody like me? How can I make everybody like me?"
A wide, deep question, this, when you think it over; and one, no doubt, that has puzzled many thousand minds, from queens' to quacks', since popularity had prizes to bestow. Wherefore it isn't surprising that Charlotte found it a hard nut for her little teeth; and it seemed to ​grow harder the more she tried to crack it.
All that day and the next and the next she thought it over, but still she failed to get an answer.
"Perhaps if I were to start a dancing class," she thought once, for instance, "everybody would like me."
But, in the first place, Charlotte couldn't dance; and, in the second place, there was nowhere in Penfield where a dancing class could be held except in Thayer Hall; and Deacon Thayer didn't believe in dancing, because of what the daughter of Herodias once did, and he wasn't going to have any such doings going on in Thayer Hall. So, you see, that wouldn't do.
"Perhaps if I gave comic recitations, like Bertha Ennis does, and made them all laugh," thought Charlotte another time, "everybody would like me."
But in the first place, Charlotte's wasn't the comic spirit (her childhood at ​Marlin Mills had something to do with this); and, in the second place, whenever she had to speak in public her feet seemed to grow so big and her hands so red, and her voice seemed to proceed from such a far country, that the whole proceeding was more like a nightmare to Charlotte than anything else.
So, as you plainly see again, that wouldn't do.
"If I could only do something to make myself famous," she thought, "everybody might like me."
But this, as she realized at once, was Sum Number Two, and after a few minutes' reflection it looked like a harder nut to crack than Number One.
"It's a good thing the easiest one comes first," she droopingly told herself, discouraged for a moment. It was only for a moment, though, and then her beaky little nose went up as resolutely as ever. "Never mind!" she cried. "I'll get them yet."
WHEN IT WAS OVER CHARLOTTE KNEW THAT THE MARTIN CREAMERY COMPANY HAD GONE INTO BANKRUPTCY
"So I'm not only homely," she whispered to her sober little self that night, "I'm poor as well!" And listening to Margaret, who was playing the piano to Willis Hayland, downstairs, she couldn't help half sobbing to herself: "Oh, dear! I'd rather be smart than pretty, but doesn't it make an awful lot of work?"
​For a long time after the piano downstairs had stopped, Charlotte lay awake, her Three Great Sums temporarily eclipsed by that greater problem which comes to nearly all of us at some time or other: that absorbing conundrum which relates to the making of a living, and is sometimes referred to as the Problem of Existence.
"Oh, well," she thought, punching the pillow just before she settled down to sleep, "I'm young and healthy, and that's a lot to be thankful for. Think of those poor emigrant girls who come over here, strangers in a strange land, and can't even speak English. If they can get on I'm sure I can. So I'm not going to worry any more about it. There's some way I can make a living in a great, big country like this, and if I'm smart it won't take me long to find out how."
She "found out how" the very next day, and the thought came to her (as such things often do) like a flash. "The ​teacher never stayed at the Mills for more than a year," she thought. "I'll go right over to Mr. Chapman's and see if there's a vacancy now."
But before going to see the school superintendent she put on her longest dress, and did her hair up old, and looked so prim and old-fashioned that all she needed was a bonnet and you would have thought that she had stepped right out of one of those old daguerrotypes, the kind with the oval pictures and the mats with the old-rose plush.
Mr. Chapman beamed when he saw his brightest graduate, and would have joked with her, but Charlotte was afraid to beam or joke back for fear he might think her too young or too giddy. So she sat sedately on the edge of her chair and sedately stated her errand. And how her heart jumped when she learned that there was indeed a vacancy at Marlin Mills, and how it jumped again when Mr. Chapman promised her the position! ​The very next day but one she received an official letter from the School Committee, formally appointing her to the vacant position. The salary was twenty-five dollars a month; but she couldn't have been any happier if it had been two hundred and fifty.
"I'm independent—independent!" she sang to herself, with much the same spirit, no doubt, that her forebears sang after a certain momentous affair which began in 1776; and she ran to the kitchen with the look of one who had the world at her feet.
"So you're really going?" asked Aunt Grace in a tired, flat voice. Aunt Grace had been ironing Margaret's dresses for the last two hours and looked as tired as she sounded.
* Yes, aunty, and I'm awfully sorry everytime I think of leaving you. Mr. Briggs is going to drive me over in the morning, so I must pack now."
Aunt Grace put the cool iron back on ​the stove and tried a new one with a quick dab of her moistened finger. The motion was quicker than the eye could follow, but her thoughts seemed to be on something else, because while she was trying the iron she was drawing a long, slow sigh. "I shall miss you an awful lot, Charlotte," she said.
They looked at each other—aunt and niece; Experience and Youth—and though neither spoke, each knew that the other was thinking of Margaret. As though by mutual consent they stood listening for a moment to the song Margaret was practising in the front room:
"You're wonderful—" (Chord)
"You're marvelous—" ( Chord)
"You're the sweetest girl in the world."
Aunt Grace spoke first. Not even by silence would she consciously place her pretty daughter in the wrong. "If you ever find it lonesome over there," she said, "you come right back here. ​I'll run up and help you pack as soon as I get this other dress done."
Charlotte had to pass through the hall to go upstairs.
Margaret heard her and swung around on the piano stool. She was wearing a pink-and-white-striped skirt and a washable-silk blouse and, especially in comparison with her mother in the kitchen, she looked refreshingly sweet and cool. "Where are you going?" she asked.
"Upstairs," said Charlotte.
"What are you going to do?"
"Pack."
"Then you're really going to that hole?"
"Yes, I'm really going—to that hole—and earn my own living in that hole, if you want to know."
Margaret laughed. "I was telling Willis about it last night," she said. "He says the only people at Marlin ​Mills are three old maids and a half-witted boy."
"When I get there there'll he four old maids," said Charlotte shortly.
"Oh, I don't know," laughed Margaret. "There's the half-witted boy, remember."
Charlotte bit the end of her tongue and went upstairs; but the next morning as she rode back to her birthplace in Mr. Briggs' wagon she found herself thinking of what her pretty cousin had told her.
When they first left Penfield the houses they passed had a prosperous appearance, and the people she saw waved their hands at her. But gradually, as they jolted farther and farther into the country, the farms began to look more and more dilapidated, and sharp-faced curiosity was seen more often than smiles.
"Great country for rocks hereabout," said Mr. Briggs, stroking his enormous ​mustache. "Farmers used to sharpen their sheep's noses so they could get a bite between the stones." After this ancient jest Mr. Briggs mutely retired (if one may speak that way) behind his enormous mustache, as though the prospect depressed him and he wished to philosophize upon life.
"There's one comfort," thought Charlotte, looking around: "It can't get any worse than this."
But a mile or two farther, after passing three abandoned farms, one after another, they came to the most desolate of all desolate sights, an abandoned church, with its steeple awry and its roof fallen in.
"Oh!" gasped Charlotte.
"Pretty bad!" agreed Mr. Briggs.
"What's the matter with these farms that the people don't stay here?"
"Too fur from the railway to take their milk. Sixteen miles there and back ​every day. Too much for any farm team."
"Then why does anybody live here?"
"Search me!" said the candid Mr. Briggs. "No place else to go, I guess."
Whereupon he retired again behind his enormous mustache, and poor Charlotte's heart felt so heavy and moved so strangely that it might have been a little pair of millstones in her bosom, grinding a grist of doleful premonitions. Knowing herself to be not far from tears she opened her bag for her handkerchief, and the first thing that touched her hand was that purple memorandum book in which she had entered her Three Great Sums.
"To make everybody like me!" she thought, looking around. "To make myself famous! And to marry a millionaire! Snf-ha!"
"Did you speak? " asked Mr. Briggs.
"N-no," said Charlotte in an uncertain voice. "I was laughing; that's all."