midnight
In an undefined way , the growing girl realized that such a state of mind and heart was unworthy her sacred friendship with Miss Margaret . `` I want to be like her -- and she was never ugly in her feelings like what I was all morning ! '' When she reached home , she so effectually made up for lost time in the vigor with which she attacked the Saturday cleaning that Mrs. Getz , with unusual forbearance , decided not to tell her father of her insubordination . Tillie wrote her first letter to Miss Margaret , ty stealth , at midnight . A crucial struggle with her father , to which both Tillie and Miss Margaret had fearfully looked forward , came about much sooner than Tillie had anticipated . The occasion of it , too , was not at all what she had expected and even planned it to be . It was her conversion , just a year after she had been taken out of school , to the ascetic faith of the New Mennonites that precipitated the crisis , this conversion being wrought by a sermon which she heard at the funeral of a neighboring farmer .