teract
Mr. Getz's influence with the Board. Tillie, too, missed no least
opportunity to plead her cause with them, not only by direct argument,
but by the indirect means of doing her best possible work in her school.

But both she and the doctor realized, as the weeks moved on, that they
were working in vain; for Mr. Getz, in his statements to the directors,
had appealed to some of their most deep-rooted prejudices. Tillie's
filial insubordination, her "high-mindedness," her distaste for
domestic work, so strong that she refused even to live under her
father's roof--all these things made her unfit to be an instructor and
guide to their young children. She would imbue the "rising generation"
with her worldly and wrong-headed ideas.

Had Tillie remained "plain," she would no doubt have had the
championship of the two New Mennonite members of the Board. But her
apostasy had lost her even that defense, for she no longer wore her
nun-like garb. After her suspension from meeting and her election to
William Penn, she had gradually drifted into the conviction that colors
other than gray, black, or brown were probably pleasing to the Creator,
and that what really mattered was not what she wore, but what she was.
It was without any violent struggles or throes of anguish that, in this
revolution of her faith, she quite naturally fell away from the creed
which once had held her such a devotee. When she presently appeared in
the vain and ungodly habiliments of "the world's people," the brethren
gave her up in despair and excommunicated her.

"No use, Tillie," the doctor would report in discouragement, week after
week; "we're up against it sure this time! You're losin' William Penn
till next month, or I'll eat my hat! A body might as well TRY to eat
his hat as move them pig-headed Dutch once they get sot. And they're
sot on puttin' you out, all right! You see, your pop and Nathaniel
Puntz they just fixed 'em! Me and you ain't got no show at all."

Tillie could think of no way of escape from her desperate position.
What was there before her but a return to the farm, or perhaps, at
best, marriage with Absalom?

"To be sure, I should have to be reduced to utter indifference to my
fate if I ever consented to marry Absalom," she bitterly told herself.
"But when it is a question between doing that and living at home, I
don't know but I might be driven to it!"

At times, the realization that there was no possible appeal from her
situ