The Chautauqua Girls At Home Part 23

"If you think so, why have we the present system in our school?"

"My dear friend, I did not manufacture the school; it is as I found it; and there are those young ladies, who, however unfaithful they are--and a few of them are just that--do not reach the only point where they could give positive help, that of resigning, and giving us a chance to do better. Besides, they are, as you say, sensitive; they do not like to be called to account for occasional absences; in fact, they do not like being controlled in any way."

"That is one of the marked difficulties," Marion said, eagerly. "Now I have heard people talk, who led you to infer that it was the easiest thing in life to mold these young teachers into the required shape and form; that you had only to sweetly suggest and advise and direct, and they sweetly succ.u.mbed. Now, don't their mothers know that young ladies naturally do no such thing? It is very difficult for them to yield their opinions to one whose authority they do not recognize; and they are not fond of admitting authority even where family life sanctions it. Oh, the whole subject is just teeming with difficulties; put it in any form you will, it seems to me to be a mistake.

"Where you give these young ladies the lesson to teach, the diverse minds that are brought to bear on it make it almost impossible for the leader to give an intelligent summing up. How is she to discover what special point has been taken up by each teacher? As a bit of private experience, I think she will be a fortunate woman if she finds that _any_ point at all has been reached in many of the cla.s.ses.

"There is only now and then a teacher who believes that little children are capable of understanding the application of a story. I can't understand why, if that is the best method of managing a primary cla.s.s, people take the trouble to have a separate room and another superintendent. Why don't they stay in the main department? I always thought that one of the special values of a separate room was that the lesson may be given in a distinct and natural tone of voice, and with ill.u.s.trations and accompaniments that cannot be used, where many cla.s.ses are together, without disturbing some of them.

"If, on the other hand, the sub-teachers are not expected to give the lesson, but only to teach certain opening recitations, then you have the spectacle of employing a dozen or twenty persons to do the work of one.

Then there's another thing; our room is not suited to the plan of subdivision, and there is only occasionally a room that has been built to order, which is--"

"On the whole, you do not at all believe in the plan of subdivision,"

Dr. Dennis said, laughing.

And then callers came, and Marion took her leave.

"I am not quite sure whether I like him or dislike him, or whether I am afraid of him just a trifle." This she said to the girls as they went home from prayer-meeting. "He has a queer way of branching off from the subject entirely, just when you suppose that you have interested him.

Sometimes he interrupts with a sentence that sounds wonderfully as if he might be quizzing you. He is a trifle queer anyway. I don't believe I love him with all the zeal that a person should bestow on a pastor. I am loyal on that subject theoretically, but practically I stand in awe."

"I don't see how you can think him sarcastic," Flossy said. "There is not the least tinge of that element in his nature, I think; at least I have never seen it. I don't feel afraid of him, either; once I thought I should; but he is so gentle and pleasant, and meets one half way, and understands what one wants to tell better than they understand themselves. Oh, I like him ever so much. He is not sarcastic to me."

Marion looked down upon the fair little girl at her side with a smile that had a sort of almost motherly tenderness in it, as she said, gently:

"One would be a very bear to think of quizzing a humming-bird, you know.

It would be very silly in him to be sarcastic to you."

Eurie interrupted the talk:

"What is the matter with the prayer-meetings?" she asked. "Do any of you know? I do wish we could do something to make them less forlorn. I am almost homesick every time I go. If there were more people there the room wouldn't look so desolate. Why on earth don't the people come?"

"Const.i.tutionally opposed to prayer-meetings; or it is too warm, or too damp, or too something, for most of them to go out," Marion said.

And Ruth added:

"It is not wonderful that you find sarcastic people in the world, Marion. The habit grows on you."

"Does it," Marion asked, speaking with sadness. "I am sorry to hear that. I really thought I was improving."

"The question is, can we do anything to improve matters?" Eurie said.

"Can't we manage to smuggle some more people into that chapel on Wednesday evenings?"

"Invite them to go, do you mean?" Flossy said, and her eyes brightened.

"I never thought of that. We might get our friends to go. Who knows what good might be done in that way? What if we try it?"

Ruth looked gloomy. This way of working was wonderfully distasteful to her. She specially disliked what she called thrusting unpopular subjects on people's attention. But she reflected that she had never yet found a way to work which she did like; so she was silent.

Flossy, according to her usual custom, persistently followed up the new idea.

"Let us try it," she said. "Suppose we pledge ourselves each to bring another to the meeting next week."

"If we can," Marion said, significantly.

"Well, of course, some of us can," Eurie answered. "You ought to be able to, anyway. There you are in a school-room, surrounded by hundreds of people who ought to go; and in a boarding-house, coming in contact with dozens of another stamp, who are in equal need. I should think you had opportunities enough."

"I know it," Marion said, promptly. "If I were only situated as you are, with n.o.body but a father and mother, and a brother and a couple of sisters to ask--people who are of no special consequence to you, and about whom it will make no personal difference to you whether they go to church or not--it would be some excuse for not bringing anybody; but a boarding-house full of men and women, and a room full of school girls!--consider your privileges, Marion Wilbur."

Eurie laughed.

"Oh, I can get Nell to go," she said. "He nearly always does what I want him to. But I was thinking how many you have to work among."

"Six people are as good to work among as sixty, until you get them all,"

Marion answered, quickly.

As for Ruth, it was only the darkness that hid her curling lip. She someway could not help disliking people who, like Nellis Mitch.e.l.l, always did what they were asked to do, just to oblige. Also, she dreaded this new plan. She had no one to ask, no one to influence. So she said to herself, gloomily, although (knowing that it was untrue) she did not venture to say it aloud. She gave consent, of course, to the proposition to try by personal effort to increase the number at prayer-meeting. It would be absurd to object to it. She did not care to own that she shrunk from personal effort of this sort; it was a grief to her very soul that she did so shrink.

"Remember, we stand pledged to try for one new face at the prayer-meeting," Eurie said, as she bade them good night. "Pledged to _try_, you understand, Marion, we can at least do that, even if we don't succeed."

"In the meantime, remember that we have our Bible evening to-morrow,"

Marion returned. "You are to come bristling with texts from your standpoint; it will not do to forget that."

[Ill.u.s.tration]

[Ill.u.s.tration]

CHAPTER XVII.

THE DISCUSSION.

MARION went about her dingy room brus.h.i.+ng off a bit of dust here, setting a chair straight there, trying in what ways she might to brighten its homeliness. She was a trifle sore sometimes over the contrast between that room and the homes of her three friends. Sometimes she thought it a wonder that they could endure to leave the brightness and cheer that surrounded their home lives and seek her out.

There were times when she was very much tempted to spend a large portion of her not too large salary in bestowing little home-looking things on this corner of the second-rate boarding-house; a rocking-chair; a cozy-looking, bright-covered old-fas.h.i.+oned lounge; a tiny centre-table, instead of the square, boxy-looking thing that she had; not very extravagant her notions were, just a suggestion of comfort and a touch of brightness for her beauty-loving eyes to dwell on; but these home things, and these bright things, cost money, more money than she felt at liberty to spend.

When her necessary expenses of books and dress, and a dozen apparently trifling incidentals were met, there was little enough left to send to that far-away, struggling uncle and aunt, who needed her help sadly enough, and who had shared their little with her in earlier days.

There was no special love about this offering of hers; it was just a matter of hard duty; they had taken care of her in her orphanhood, a grave, preoccupied sort of care, bestowing little time and no love on her that she could discover; at the same time they had never either of them been unkind, and they had fed and clothed her, and never said in her presence that they grudged it; they had never asked her for any return, never seemed to expect any; and they were regularly surprised every half year when the remittance came.

But so far as that was concerned Marion did not know it; they were a very undemonstrative people. Uncle Reuben had told her once that she need not do it, that they had not expected it of her; and Aunt Hannah had added, "No more they didn't." But Marion had hushed them both by a decided sentence, to the effect that it was nothing more than ordinary justice and decency. And she did not know even now that the grat.i.tude they might have expressed was hushed back by her cold, business-like words.

Still, the remittances always went; it had required some special scrimping to make the check the same as usual, and yet bring in Chautauqua; it had been delayed beyond its usual time by these new departures, and it was on this particular evening that she was getting it ready for the mail. For seven years, twice a year, she had regularly written her note:

AUNT HANNAH:--I inclose in this letter a check for ----. I hope you are as well as usual.

In haste, M. J. WILBUR.

This, or a kindred sentence as brief and as much to the point. To-night her fingers had played with the pen instead of writing, and at last, with a curious smile hovering around her lip, she wrote the unaccustomed words, "Dear Aunt." It would have taken very little to have made the smile into a quiver; it seemed just then so strange that she should have no one to write that word "dear" to; that she should use it so rarely that it actually looked like a stranger to her. Then the writing went on thus: