Miss Sarah Fuller, principal of the Horace Mann School, offers to teach Helen to speak.  Helen learns to speak rapidly and audibly greets her family on her next visit to Tuscumbia.

Spring, 1891

Helen lobbies on behalf of Tommy Stringer, a deaf and blind boy from Pennsylvania. The success and social contacts she develops during this period inspire her later to devote her life towards working for the public good. Helen wrote many letters, including one in the Boston Globe that inspired people to send in $1600.

November, 1891

After several years at the Perkins Institute, Helen sends the story, "The Frost King," as a birthday present to the director of the institute, Michael Anagnos.  He subsequently publishes it in the Perkins Papers.  Months later, it is discovered that the story was markedly similar to "The Frost Faeries," by Margaret T. Canby.  Eventually Anagnos feels that Helen had plagiarized the story.