1 The old stage coach was rumbling along the dusty road that runs from Maplewood to Riverboro. The day was as warm as midsummer, though it was only the middle of May, and Mr. Jeremiah Cobb was favoring the horses as much as possible, yet never losing sight of the fact that he carried the mail.
2 There was one passenger in the coach,—a small dark-haired person in a glossy buff calico dress. She was so slender and so stiffly starched that she slid from space to space on the leather cushions, though she braced herself against the middle seat with her feet and extended her cotton-gloved hands on each side, in order to maintain some sort of balance.
3 When he was about to leave the post-office in Maplewood that morning, a woman had alighted from a wagon, and coming up to him, inquired whether this were the Riverboro stage, and if he were Mr. Cobb. Being answered in the affirmative, she nodded to a child who was eagerly waiting for the answer, and who ran towards her as if she feared to be a moment too late. The child might have been ten or eleven years old perhaps, but whatever the number of her summers, she had an air of being small for her age. Her mother helped her into the stage coach, deposited a bundle and a bouquet of lilacs beside her, superintended the “roping on” behind of an old hair trunk, and finally paid the fare, counting out the silver with great care.
4 “I want you to take her to my sisters’ in Riverboro,” she said. “Do you know Mirandy and Jane Sawyer? They live in the brick house.”
5 Lord bless your soul, he knew ‘em as well as if he’d made ‘em!
6 “Well, she’s going there, and they’re expecting her…
7 They had been called the Sawyer girls when Miranda at eighteen, Jane at twelve, and Aurelia at eight participated in the various activities of village life; and when Riverboro fell into a habit of thought or speech, it saw no reason for falling out of it, at any rate in the same century. So, although Miranda and Jane were between fifty and sixty at the time this story opens, Riverboro still called them the Sawyer girls. They were spinsters; but Aurelia, the youngest, had made what she called a romantic marriage and what her sisters termed a mighty poor speculation. “There’s worse things than bein’ old maids,” they said; whether they thought so is quite another matter.
8 Miranda and Jane had virtually washed their hands of Aurelia when she married Lorenzo de
Medici Randall. Having exhausted the resources of Riverboro and its immediate vicinity, the unfortunate couple had moved on and on in a steadily decreasing scale of prosperity until they had reached Temperance, where they had settled down and invited fate to do its worst, an invitation which was promptly accepted. The maiden sisters at home wrote to Aurelia two or three times a year, and sent modest but serviceable presents to the children at Christmas, but refused to assist L. D. M. with the regular expenses of his rapidly growing family. His last investment was a small farm two miles from Temperance. Aurelia managed this herself, and so it proved a home at least, and a place for the unsuccessful Lorenzo to die and to be buried.
9 Aurelia’s letter was something of a shock to the quiet, elderly spinsters of the brick house; for it said that Rebecca would come as soon as she could be made ready…and that the regular schooling and church privileges, as well as the influence of the Sawyer home, would doubtless be “the making of Rebecca.”
10 Miranda Sawyer had a heart, of course, but she had never used it for any other purpose than the pumping and circulating of blood. . . She had never had any education other than that of the neighborhood district school, for her desires and ambitions had all pointed to the management of the house, the farm, and the dairy. Jane, on the other hand, had gone to an academy, and also to a boarding-school for young ladies; so, had Aurelia; and after all the years that had elapsed there was still a slight difference in language and in manner between the elder and the two younger sisters.
11 She tried to like her Aunt Miranda …She was a very faulty and passionately human child, with no aspirations towards being an angel of the house, but she had a sense of duty and a desire to be good, respectably, decently good…She did not like to be under her aunt’s roof, eating bread, wearing clothes, and studying books provided by her, and dislike her so heartily all the time.
12 It is needless to say that Rebecca irritated her aunt with every breath she drew. She continually forgot and started up the front stairs because it was the shortest route to her bedroom; she left the dipper on the kitchen shelf instead of hanging it up over the pail; she sat in the chair the cat liked best; she was willing to go on errands, but often forgot what she was sent for; she left the screen doors ajar, so that flies came in; her tongue was ever in motion…finally she was an everlasting reminder of her foolish, worthless father…
13 What sunshine in a shady place was Aunt Jane to Rebecca! Aunt Jane with her quiet voice, her understanding eyes, her ready excuses, in these first difficult weeks, when the impulsive little stranger was trying to settle down into the “brick house ways.” She did learn them, in part, and by degrees, and the constant fitting of herself to these new and difficult standards of conduct seemed to make her older than ever for her years.
After reading paragraph 11 from the Passage 1 and paragraph 2 from Passage 2, you can infer that Rebecca and Huck
A
feel guilty about being unhappy.
B
feel lucky to be living with their guardians.
C
want to please their guardians.
D
are trying to be good children.
1 answer
Based on paragraph 11 from Passage 1 ("...she had a sense of duty and a desire to be good, respectably, decently good…") and paragraph 2 from Passage 2 (not provided, but assuming it reflects similar themes of trying to fit in or please guardians), the best inference is that:
D. are trying to be good children.
This choice captures the essence of Rebecca's desire to be perceived positively by her aunt and the notion of fitting into new standards of conduct, suggesting an effort to behave as a good child would.
