The mirror was family legend; Hanna had heard the story many times. Mama had insisted on the mirror, and she’d had to fight Papa to get it. For one thing, it had been almost unthinkably expensive. For another, Papa was convinced that it would never arrive intact—that it was sure to break during the cross-country journey from back east.

Against his expectations, the mirror arrived in one piece. As soon as it was installed, the shop seemed grander, airier, more spacious. The mirror reflected daylight from the windows and lamplight in the evenings. It immediately became the shop’s centerpiece. Accustomed to peering at themselves in small hand-held looking glasses, or cheap, uneven saucer-size mirrors, folks came to the shop just to see the big mirror and their own reflections, full length and in perfect clarity.

Hanna had lived her whole childhood with that beautiful mirror. Now she knew that she had taken it for granted. As a young girl, she had loved blowing a puff of breath at the glass. The condensation obscured her reflection. Then she would watch as the moisture dried, and giggle to see her face revealed little by little.

She wanted the same kind of mirror for the new shop, but Papa barely let her finish the question.

“No,” he said with a glare. “We don’t need any kind of mirror, let alone one like that. We’re selling dress goods, not clothes.”

She knew from his tone of voice that it was no use arguing with him. How had Mama convinced him? Hanna would have to figure that out somehow, because she could not possibly become a dressmaker in a shop without a mirror.

On the last day of the term, she and Bess took their examinations in grammar, arithmetic, history, geography, and orthography. Miss Walters allowed them to choose the order of the tests; Hanna began with arithmetic, her least favorite, to get it out of the way. Bess did the same. They were given an hour to write down their answers for each test except arithmetic—an hour and a quarter—and history, forty-five minutes. The questions were difficult and seemed to get harder as the day went on.

Hours later, Hanna answered the final question, which required her to diagram a complex compound sentence. She was so tired that her pen wobbled as she circled the words and drew the lines.

“You may wait if you wish, girls,” Miss Walters said. “I won’t be long.”

Miss Walters had been grading each exam as the girls took the next one. At first, Hanna had found it distracting, wondering what mistakes she had made and how Miss Walters was marking them. But the challenges of the tests had forced her to concentrate, and she had spent most of the time alone in her head.