A DAY IN A CASA DEI BAMBINI
I had not seen a Montessori school when I first read through Dr.
Montessori’s book. I laid it down with the mental comments, “All very
well to write about! But, of course, it can’t work anything like that
in actual practice. Everyone knows that a child’s party of only five or
six children of that age (from two and a half to six) is seldom carried
through without some sort of quarrel, even though an equal number of
mothers are present, devoting themselves to giving the tots exactly
whatever they want. It stands to reason that twenty or thirty children
of that tender age, shut up together all day long and day after day,
must, if they are normal children, have a great many healthy normal
battles with each other!”
After putting myself in a dispassionate and judicial frame of mind by
laying down these fixed preconceptions, I went to visit the Casa dei
Bambini in the Franciscan Nunnery on the Via Giusti.
I half turn away in anticipatory discouragement from the task of
attempting, for the benefit of American readers, any description of
what I saw there. They will not believe it. I know they will not,
because I myself, before I saw it with my own eyes, would have
discounted largely the most moderate statements on the subject. But
even though stay-at-home people in other centuries may have salted
liberally the tall stories of old-time travelers, they certainly had
a taste for hearing them; and so possibly my plain account of what I
saw that day may be read, even though it be to the accompaniment of
incredulous exclamations.
My first glimpse was of a gathering of about twenty-five children,
so young that several of them looked like real babies to me. I found
afterwards that the youngest was just under three, and the oldest just
over six. They were scattered about over a large, high-ceilinged, airy
room, furnished with tiny, lightly-framed tables and chairs which,
however, by no means filled the floor. There were big tracts of open
space, where some of the children knelt or sat on light rugs. One was
lying down on his back, kicking his feet in the air. A low, cheerful
hum of conversation filled the air.
As my companion and I came into the room I noticed first that there was
not that stiffening into self-consciousness which is the inevitable
concomitant of “visitors” in our own schoolrooms. Most of the children,
absorbed in various queer-looking tasks, did not even glance up as we
entered. Others, apparently resting in the intervals between games,
looked over across the room at us, smiled welcomingly as I would at
a visitor entering my house, and a little group near us ran up with
outstretched hands, saying with a pleasant accent of good-breeding,
“Good-morning! Good-morning!” They then instantly went off about their
own affairs, which were evidently of absorbing interest, for after
that, except for an occasional friendly look or smile, or a momentary
halt by my side to show me something, none of the little scholars paid
the least attention to me.
[Illustration: THE SCHOOL ROOM IN THE CONVENT OF THE FRANCISCAN NUNS IN
THE VIA GIUSTI.
Copyright 1912, by Carl R. Byoir]
Now I myself, like all the American matrons of my circle of
acquaintances, am laboring conscientiously to teach my children
“good manners,” but I decided, on the instant, nothing would induce
me to collect twenty children of our town and have a Montessori
teacher enter the room to be greeted by them. The contrast would be
too painful. These were mostly children of very poor, ignorant, and
utterly untrained parents, and ours are children of people who flatter
themselves that they are the opposite of all that; but I shuddered
to think of the long silent, discourteous stare which is the only
recognition of the presence of a visitor in our schools. And yet I
felt at once that I was attaching too much importance to a detail, the
merest trifle, the slightest, most superficial indication of the life
beneath. We Anglo-Saxons notice too acutely, I thought, these surface
differences of manner.
But, on the other hand, I was forced to consider that I knew from
bitter experience that children of that age are still near enough
babyhood to be absolutely primeval in their sincerity, and that it is
practically impossible to make them, with any certainty of the result,
go through a form of courtesy which they do not feel genuinely. Also
I observed that no one had pushed the children towards us, as I push
mine, toward a chance visitor, with the command accompanied by an
inward prayer for obedience, “Go and shake hands with Mrs. Blank.”
In fact, I noticed it for the first time, there seemed no one there
to push the children or to refrain from doing it. That collection of
little tots, most of them too busy over their mysterious occupations
even to talk, seemed, as far as a casual glance over the room went,
entirely without supervision. Finally, from a corner, where she had
been sitting (on the floor apparently) beside a child, there rose up a
plainly-dressed woman, the expression of whose quiet face made almost
as great an impression on me as the children’s greetings had. I had
always joined with heartfelt sympathy in the old cry of “Heaven help
the poor teachers!” and in our town, where we all know and like the
teachers personally, their exhausted condition of almost utter nervous
collapse by the end of the teaching year is a painful element in our
community life. But I felt no impulse to sympathize with this woman
with untroubled eyes who, perceiving us for the first time, came over
to shake hands with us. Instead, I felt a curious pang of envy, such as
once or twice in my sentimental and stormy girlhood I felt at the sight
of the peaceful face of a nun. I am now quite past the possibility of
envying the life of a nun, but I must admit that it suddenly occurred
to me, as I looked at that quiet, smiling Italian woman, that somehow
my own life, for all its full happiness, must lack some element of
orderliness, of discipline, of spiritual economy which alone could have
put that look of calm certainty on her face. It was not the passive,
changeless peace that one sees in the eyes of some nuns, but a sort of
rich, full-blooded confidence in life.
She lingered beside us some moments, chatting with my companion,
who was an old friend of hers, and who introduced her as Signorina
Ballerini. I noticed that she happened to stand all the time with her
back to the children, feeling apparently none of that lion-tamer’s
instinct to keep an hypnotic eye on the little animals which is so
marked in our instructors. I can remember distinctly that there was for
us school-children actually a different feel to the air and a strange
look on the familiar school-furniture during those infrequent intervals
when the teacher was called for an instant from the room and left us,
as in a suddenly rarefied atmosphere, giddy with the removal of the
pressure of her eye; but when this teacher turned about casually to
face the room again, these children did not seem to notice either that
she had stopped looking at them or that she was now doing it again.
We used to know, as by a sixth sense, exactly where, at any moment,
the teacher was, and a sudden movement on her part would have made us
all start as violently and as instinctively as little chicks at the
sudden shadow of a hawk ... and this, although we were often very fond
indeed of our teachers. Remembering this, I noticed with surprise that
often, when one of these little ones lifted his face from his work to
ask the teacher a question, he had been so unconscious of her presence
during his concentration on his enterprise that he did not know in
the least where to look, and sent his eager eyes roving over the big
room in a search for her, which ended in such a sudden flash of joy at
discovering her that I felt again a pang of envy for this woman who had
so many more loving children than I have.
What could be these “games” which so absorbed these children, far
too young for any possibility of pretense on their part? Moving with
the unhampered, unobserved ease which is the rule in a Montessori
schoolroom, I began walking about, looking more closely at what the
children were holding, and I could have laughed at the simplicity
of many of the means which accomplished the apparent miracle of
self-imposed order and discipline before me ... if I had not been ready
to cry at my own stupidity for not thinking of them myself. One little
boy about three and a half years old had been intent on some operation
ever since we had entered the room, and even now as I drew near his
little table and chair, he only glanced up for an instant’s smile
without stopping the action of his fingers. I leaned over him, hoping
that the device which so held his attention was not too complicated
for my inexperienced, unpedagogical mind to take in. He was holding
a light wooden frame about eighteen inches square, on which were
stretched two pieces of cotton cloth, meeting down the middle like the
joining of a garment. On one of these edges was a row of buttonholes
and on the other a row of large bone buttons. The child was absorbed in
buttoning and unbuttoning those two pieces of cloth.
He was new at the game, that was to be seen by the clumsy, misdirected
motions of his baby fingers, but the process of his improvement was so
apparent as, his eyes shining with interest, he buttoned and unbuttoned
steadily, slowly, without an instant’s interruption, that I watched
him, almost as fascinated as he. A child near us, apparently playing
with blocks, upset them with a loud noise, but my buttoning boy,
wrapped in his magic cloak of concentration, did not so much as raise
his eyes. I myself could not look away, and as I gazed I thought of
the many times a little child of mine had tried to learn the secret of
the innumerable fastenings which hold her clothes together and how I,
with the kindest impulse in the world, had stopped her fumbling little
fingers saying, “No, dear, Mother can do that so much better. Let
Mother do it.” It occurred to me now that the situation was very much
as if, in the midst of a fascinating game of billiards, a professional
player had snatched the cue from my husband’s hands, saying, “You just
stand and watch me do this. I can do it much better than you.”
The child before me stopped his work a moment and looked down at his
little cotton waist. There was a row of buttons there, smaller but of
the same family as those on the frame. As he gazed down, absorbed, at
them, I could see a great idea dawn in his face. I leaned forward.
He attacked the middle button, using with startling exactitude of
imitation the same motion he had learned on his frame. But this button
was not so large or so well placed. He had to bend his head over, his
fingers were cramped, he made several movements backward. But then
suddenly the first half of his undertaking was accomplished. The button
was on one side, the buttonhole on the other. I held my breath. He set
to work again. The cloth slipped from his boneless little fingers, the
button twisted itself awry, I fairly ached with the idiotic habit of
years of interference to snatch it and do it for him. And then I saw
that he was slowly forcing it into place. When the bone disk finally
shone out, round and whole, on the far side of the buttonhole, the
child drew a long breath and looked up at me with so ecstatic a face
of triumph that I could have shouted, “Hurrah!” Then, without paying
any more attention to me, he rose, sauntered over to a corner of the
room where a thick piece of felt covered the floor, and lay down on his
back, his hands clasped under his head, gazing with tranquil, reposeful
vacuity at the ceiling. He was resting himself after accomplishing
a great step forward. I did not fail to notice that, except for my
entirely fortuitous observation of his performance, nobody had seen his
absorption any more than they now saw his apparent idleness.
I tucked all these observations away in a corner of my mind for future
reflection, and moved on to the nearest child, a little girl, perhaps
a year older than the boy, who was absorbed as eagerly as he over a
similar light wooden frame, covered with two pieces of cloth. But these
were fastened together with pieces of ribbon which the child was tying
and untying. There was no fumbling here. As rapidly, as deftly, with
as careless a light-hearted ease as a pianist running over his scales,
she was making a series of the flattest, most regular bow-knots, much
better, I knew in my heart, than I could accomplish at anything like
that speed. Although she had advanced beyond the stage of intent
struggle with her material, her interest and pleasure in her own skill
was manifest. She looked up at me, and then smiled proudly down at her
flying fingers.
Beyond her another little boy, with a leather-covered frame, was
laboriously inserting shoe-buttons into their buttonholes with the
aid of an ordinary button-hook. As I looked at him, he left off, and
stooping over his shoes, tried to apply the same system to their
buttons. That was too much for him. After a prolonged struggle he gave
it up for the time, returning, however, to the buttons on his frame
with entirely undiminished ardor.
Next to him sat a little girl, with a pile of small pieces of money
before her on her tiny table. She was engaged in sorting these into
different piles according to their size, and, though I stood by her
some time, laughing at the passion of accuracy which fired her, she
was so absorbed that she did not even notice my presence. As I turned
away I almost stumbled over a couple of children sitting on the floor,
engaged in some game with a variety of blocks which looked new to me.
They were ten squared rods of equal thickness, of which the shortest
looked to be a tenth the length of the longest, and the others of
regularly diminishing lengths between these two extremes. These were
painted in alternate stripes of red and blue, these stripes being
the same width as the shortest rod. The children were putting these
together in consecutive order so as to make a sort of series, and
although they were evidently much too young to count, they were aiding
themselves by touching with their fingers each of the painted stripes,
and verifying in this way the length of the rod. I could not follow
this process, although it was plainly something arithmetical, and
turned to ask the teacher about it.
I saw her across the room engaged in tying a bandage about a child’s
eyes. Wondering if this were some new, scientific form of punishment,
I stepped to that part of the room and watched the subsequent
proceedings. The child, his lips curved in an expectant smile, even
laughing a little in pleasant excitement, turned his blindfolded face
to a pile of small pieces of cloth before him. Several children,
walking past, stopped and hung over the edge of his desk with lively
interest. The boy drew out from the pile a piece of velvet. He felt
of this intently, running the sensitive tips of his fingers lightly
over the nap, and cocking his head on one side in deep thought. The
child-spectators gazed at him with sympathetic attention. When he gave
the right name, they all smiled and nodded their heads in satisfaction.
He drew out another piece from the big pile, coarse cotton cloth this
time, which he instantly recognized; then a square of satin over
which his little finger-tips wandered with evident sensuous pleasure.
His successful naming of this was too much for his envious little
spectators. They turned and fled toward the teacher and when I reached
her, she was the center of a little group of children, all clamoring to
be blindfolded.
“How they do love that exercise!” she said, looking after them with
shining eyes ... I could have sworn, with mother’s eyes!
“Are you too busy and hurried,” I asked, “to explain to me the game
those children are playing with the red and blue rods?”
She answered with some surprise, “Oh, no, I’m not busy and hurried at
all!” (quite as though we were not all living in the twentieth century)
and went on, “The children can come and find me if they need me.”
So I had my first lesson in the theory of self-education and
self-dependence underlying the Montessori apparatus, to the
accompaniment of occasional requests for aid, or demands for sympathy
over an achievement, made in clear, baby treble. That theory will be
taken up later in this book, as this chapter is intended only to be
a plain narration of a few of the sights encountered by an ordinary
observer in a morning in a Montessori school.
After a time I noticed that four little girls were sitting at a
neatly-ordered small table, spread with a white cloth, apparently
eating their luncheons. The teacher, in answer to my inquiring glance
at them, explained that it was their turn to be the waitresses that
day, for the children’s lunch, and so they ate their own meal first.
She was called away just then, and I sat looking at the roomful of busy
children, listening to the pleasant murmur of their chats together,
watching them move freely about as they liked, noting their absorbed,
happy concentration on their tasks. Already some of the sense of the
miraculous which had been so vivid in my mind during my first survey
of the school was dulled, or rather, explained away. Now that I had
seen some of the details composing the picture, the whole seemed more
natural. It was not surprising, for instance, that the little girl
sorting the pieces of money should not instead be pulling another
child’s hair, or wandering in aimless and potentially naughty idleness
about the room. It was not necessary either to force or exhort her to
be a quiet and untroublesome citizen of that little republic. She
would no more leave her fascinating occupation to go and “be naughty”
than a professor of chemistry would leave an absorbing experiment in
his laboratory to go and rob a candy-store. In both cases it would
be leaving the best sort of a “good time” for a much less enjoyable
undertaking.
In the midst of these reflections (my first glimmer of understanding of
what it was all about), a lively march on the piano was struck up. Not
a word was spoken by the teacher, indeed I had not yet heard her voice
raised a single time to make a collective remark to the whole body of
children, but at once, acting on the impulse which moves us all to run
down the street towards the sound of a brass band, most of the children
stopped their work and ran towards the open floor-space near the piano.
Some of the older ones, of five, formed a single-file line, which was
rapidly recruited by the monkey-like imitativeness of the little ones,
into a long file. The music was martial, the older children held their
heads high and stamped loudly as they marched about, keeping time very
accurately to the strongly marked rhythm of the tune. The little tots
did their baby best to copy their big brothers and sisters, some of
them merely laughing and stamping up and down without any reference
to the time, others evidently noticing a difference between their
actions and those of the older ones, and trying to move their feet more
regularly.
No one had suggested that they leave their work-tables to play in
this way (indeed a few too absorbed to heed the call of the music
still hung intently over their former occupations), no one suggested
that they step in time to the music, no one corrected them when they
did not. The music suddenly changed from a swinging marching air to a
low, rhythmical croon. The older children instantly stopped stamping
and began trotting noiselessly about on their tiptoes, imitated again
as slavishly as possible by the admiring smaller ones. The uncertain
control of their equilibrium by these littler ones, made them stagger
about, as they practised this new exercise, like the little bacchantes,
intoxicated with rhythm, which their glowing faces of delight seemed to
proclaim them.
I was penetrated with that poignant, almost tearful sympathy in their
intense enjoyment which children’s pleasure awakens in every adult
who has to do with them. “Ah, what a _good_ time they are having!” I
cried to myself, and then reflected that they had been having some sort
of very good time ever since I had come into the room. And yet even
my unpractised eye could see a difference between this good time and
the kindergarten, charming as that is to watch. No prettily-dressed,
energetic, thoroughgoing young lady had beckoned the children away
from their self-chosen occupations. There was no set circle here with
the lovely teacher in the middle, and every child’s eyes fastened
constantly on her nearly always delightful but also overpoweringly
developed adult personality. There was no set “game” being played,
the discontinuation of which depended on the teacher’s more or less
accurate guess at when the children were becoming tired. Indeed,
as I reflected on this, I noticed that, although the bigger ones
were continuing their musical march with undiminished pleasure, the
younger ones had already exhausted the small amount of consecutive
interest their infant organisms are capable of, and, without spoiling
the fun for the others, indeed without being observed, had suddenly
stopped dancing and prancing as suddenly as they began and, with the
kitten-like fitfulness of their age, were wandering away in groups of
two and three out to the great, open courtyard.
I suppose they went on playing quieter games there, but I did not
follow them, so absorbed was I in watching the four little girls who
had now at last finished their very leisurely meal and were preparing
the tables for the other children. They were about four and a half
and five years old, an age at which I would have thought children as
capable of solving a problem in calculus as of undertaking, without
supervision, to set tables for twenty other babies. They went at their
undertaking with no haste, indeed with a slowness which my racial
impatience found absolutely excruciating. They paused constantly for
prolonged consultations, and to verify and correct themselves as
they laid the knife, fork, spoon, plate, and napkin at each place.
Interested as I was, and beginning, as I did, to understand a little
of the ideas of the school, I still was so under the domination of my
lifetime of over-emphasis on the importance of the immediate result
of an action, that I felt the same impulse I had restrained with
difficulty beside the buttoning boy--to snatch the things from their
incompetent little hands and whisk them into place on the tables.
But then I noticed that the clock showed only a little after eleven,
and that evidently the routine of the school was planned expressly so
that there would be no need for haste.
The phrase struck my mental ear curiously, and arrested my attention.
I reflected on that condition with the astonished awe of a modern,
meeting it almost for the first time. “No need for haste”--it was like
being transported into the timeless ease of eternity.
And then I fell to asking myself why there was always so much need for
haste in my own life and in that of my children? Was it, after all,
so necessary? What were we hurrying so to accomplish? I remembered my
scorn of the parties of Cook’s tourists, clattering into the Sistine
Chapel for a momentary glance at the achievement of a lifetime of
genius, painted on the ceiling, and then galloping out again for a
hop-skip-and-jump race down through the Stanze of Raphael. It occurred
to me, disquietingly, that possibly, instead of really training my
children, I might be dragging them headlong on a Cook’s tour through
life. It also occurred to me that if the Montessori ideas were taken
up in my family, the children would not be the only ones to profit by
them.
[Illustration: THE MEAL HOUR.
Copyright 1912, by Carl R. Byoir]
When I emerged from this brown study, the little girls had finished
their task and there stood before me tables set for twenty little
people, set neatly and regularly, without an item missing. The
children, called in from their play in the courtyard, came marching
along (they do take collective action when collective interests
genuinely demand it) and sat down without suggestions, each, I suppose,
at the place he had occupied while working at those same tiny tables.
I held my breath to see the four little waitresses enter the room,
each carrying a big tureen full of hot soup. I would not have trusted
a child of that age to carry a glass of water across a room. The
little girls advanced slowly, their eyes fixed on the contents of
their tureens, their attention so concentrated on their all-important
enterprise that they seemed entirely oblivious of the outer world. A
fly lighted on the nose of one of these solemnly absorbed babies. She
twisted the tip of that feature, making the most grotesque grimaces in
her effort to dislodge the tickling intruder, but not until she had
reached a table and set down her sacred tureen in safety, did she raise
her hand to her face. I revised on the instant all my fixed convictions
about the innate heedlessness and lack of self-control of early
childhood; especially as she turned at once to her task of ladling out
the soup into the plates of the children at her table, a feat which she
accomplished as deftly as any adult could have done.
The napkins were unfolded, the older children tucked them under
their chins and began to eat their soup. The younger ones imitated
them more or less handily, though with some the process meant quite a
struggle with the napkin. One little boy, only one in all that company,
could not manage his. After wrestling with it, he brought it to the
teacher, who had dropped down on a chair near mine. So sure was I of
what her action inevitably would be, that I fairly felt my own hands
automatically follow hers in the familiar motions of tucking a napkin
under a child’s round chin.
I cannot devise any way to set down on paper with sufficient emphasis
the fact that she did not tuck that napkin in. She held it up in her
hands, showed the child how to take hold of a larger part of the
corner than he had been grasping, and, illustrating on herself, gave
him an object-lesson. Then she gave it back to him. He had caught the
idea evidently, but his undisciplined little fingers, out of sight
there, under his chin, would not follow the direction of his brain,
though that was evidently, from the grave intentness of his baby face,
working at top speed. With a sigh, that irresistible sigh of the little
child, he took out the crumpled bit of linen and looked at it sadly. I
clasped my hands together tightly to keep them from flying at him and
accomplishing the operation in a twinkling. Why, the poor child’s soup
was getting cold!
Again I wish to reiterate the statement that the teacher did not tuck
that napkin in. She took it once more and went through very slowly
all the necessary movements. The child’s big, black eyes fastened on
her in a passion of attention, and I noticed that his little empty
hands followed automatically the slow, distinctly separated, analyzed
movements of the teacher’s hands. When she gave the napkin back to him,
he seized it with an air of resolution which would have done honor
to Napoleon, grasping it firmly and holding his wandering baby-wits
together with the aid of a determined frown. He pulled his collar away
from his neck with one hand and, still frowning determinedly, thrust
a large segment of the napkin down with the other, spreading out the
remainder on his chest, with a long sigh of utter satisfaction, which
went to my heart. As he trotted back to his place, I noticed that the
incident had been observed by several of the children near us, on whose
smiling faces, as they looked at their triumphant little comrade, I
could see the reflection of my own gratified sympathy. One of them
reached out and patted the napkin as its proud wearer passed.
But I had not been all the morning in that children’s home, perfect,
though not made with a mother’s hands, without having my mother’s
jealousy sharply aroused. A number of things had been stirring up
protests in my mind. I was alarmed at the sight of all these babies,
happy, wisely occupied, perfectly good, and learning unconsciously the
best sort of lessons, and yet in an atmosphere differing so entirely
from all my preconceived ideas of a home. All this might be all very
well for Italian mothers so poor that they were obliged to leave
their children in order to go out and help earn the family living;
or for English mothers, who expect as a matter of course that their
little children shall spend most of their time with nurse-maids and
governesses. But I could not spare my children, I told myself. I asked
nothing better than to have them with me every moment they were awake.
What was to be done about this ominously excellent institution which
seemed to treat the children more wisely than I, for all my efforts?
I felt an uneasy, apprehensive hostility towards these methods,
contrasting so entirely with mine, for mine were, I assured myself
hotly, based on the most absolute, supreme mother’s love for the child.
I now turned to the teacher and said protestingly, “That would have
been a very little thing to do for a child.”
She laughed. “I’m not his nurse-maid. I’m his teacher,” she replied.
“That’s all very well, but his soup _will_ be cold, you know, and he
will be late to his luncheon!”
She did not deny this, but she did not seem as struck as I was by
the importance of the fact. She answered whimsically, “Ah, one must
remember not to obtrude one’s adult materialism into the idealistic
world of children. He is so happy over his victory over himself that he
wouldn’t notice if his soup were iced.”
[Illustration: THE MORNING CLEAN-UP.]
[Illustration: WAITER CARRYING SOUP.
Copyright 1912, by Carl R. Byoir]
“But warm soup is a good thing, a very good thing,” I insisted, “and
you have literally robbed him of his. More than that, I seem to see
that all this insistence on self-dependence for children must interfere
with a great many desirable regularities of family life.”
She looked at me indulgently. “Yes, warm soup is a good thing, but is
it such a very important thing? According to our adult standards it
is more palatable, but it’s really about as good food if eaten cold,
isn’t it? And, anyhow, he eats it cold only this once. You’d snatch him
away from his plate of warm soup without scruple if you thought he was
sitting in a draught and would take cold. Isn’t his moral health as
important as his physical?”
“But it might be very inconvenient for someone else, in an ordinary
home, to wait so interminably for him to learn to wait on himself.”
Her answer was a home-thrust. “If it’s too much trouble to give him
the best conditions at home, wouldn’t he be better sent to a Casa dei
Bambini, which has no other aim than to have things just right for his
development?”
This silenced me for a time. I turned away, but was recalled by her
remarking, “Besides, I’ve put him more in the way of getting his soup
hot from now on, than you would, by tucking in his napkin and sending
him back at once. To-day’s plateful would have been warm; but how about
to-morrow and the day after, and so on, unless you, or some other
grown-up happened to be at hand to wait on him. And on my part, what
could I do, if all twenty-five of the children were helpless?”
I seized on this opportunity to voice some of the mother’s jealousy
which underlay all my extreme admiration and astonishment at the sights
of the morning, “If you didn’t keep such an octopus clutch on the
children, separating them all day in this way from their own families,
if they were sent home to eat their luncheons, why, there would be
mothers enough to go around. _They_ would be only too glad to tuck the
little napkins in!”
The teacher looked at me, level-browed, and said, with a dry, enigmatic
accent which made me reflect uneasily, long afterwards, on her
words, “They certainly would. Do you really think that would be an
improvement?”