LIKE OTHER GIRLS
There was something that Ella wanted even more than she had wanted
the box of tin soldiers or the ride in a swan boat, and this was
that she might go to the public school. It was quite the custom for
a public school girl to invite a younger child to go with her for
half a day. If the child behaved well, the teacher made no objection,
and perhaps gave her a book of pictures to look at. If her notions
of order were not quite up to the mark, the teacher would draw the
little hostess aside and say:
“I don’t believe you’d better bring her again till she is older. She
is rather too young to have to keep quiet so long.”
Oddly enough, it had happened that Ella had never visited the public
school, and all the glory of something unknown was about it. Of
course she had heard many school stories from her playmates. She
knew that it was carried on in a businesslike fashion, that children
did not choose their books by the color of the covers or recite what
they pleased and when they pleased, and go home whenever they liked;
but that lessons had to be learned, and had to be recited when the
time for recitation had come. She knew that once in a while the
superintendent of schools came to examine the pupils, and that he
listened to their answers as if whether they were right or wrong was
really an important matter. One day, after his kindly examination of
a class in which were several of Ella’s playmates, they came home
at noon in great glee. After his examination, he had said to the
teacher—but quite loud enough for the whole room to hear,
“The children in your class have done so well that I am going to ask
you if you won’t take them out to the grove this afternoon for a
little picnic.”
They had asked the teacher if Ella might go with them, but she did
not care to be responsible for any more children and had said no, the
picnic was for the pupils only.
Now Ella was free every afternoon and could have gone to a picnic six
days in the week, if there had been one to go to; but somehow this
was different, and the tears really came into her eyes that day when
she thought of the whole class having such a good time from which she
herself was shut out. Some of these same little picnickers envied her
for coming home at one o’clock or even earlier; but nothing would
have induced them to express such a thought. The city was very proud
of her public schools. There was a general feeling that the work of
private schools was not so good; and these little girls held their
heads very high because they were parts of the great public school
system.
There were many other times when Ella felt a little shut out of
things. She played with the other children and went to their simple
parties. They came to see her Saturday afternoons and she went to
see them; but they were always speaking of little events in school
that she knew nothing about. She did so wish that she could speak in
such familiar fashion about the delight of “getting up head” and the
mortification of losing a place in the class because a word was left
out in a recitation. In Ella’s class of one, there was no head and
no foot; and when the other children talked of such things, she felt
dull and stupid and out of the magic circle.
Everything about their schools was different. At recess, Ella slipped
into the big library and read a story. They marched out into the yard
for a blissful quarter of an hour of play. She thought it would be
delightful to march out in line with her hands down at her sides, one
little girl before her and another behind her. In short, Ella wanted
to be “in things.” It never occurred to her to boast of studying
French and Latin and of reciting with “young ladies” many years older
than she. She wanted to be just like other little girls, to study
just what they studied, and to do just what they did. She did not
know what “conventional” meant, but that was what she wanted to be.
Now the time had passed for which the mother had agreed to take
charge of the “Private School for Young Ladies,” and she, too, was
thinking about public schools, and wondering a little how the small
daughter, who had gone on her own way as independently as if she
was the only child in the world, would get on with walking between
parallel lines and being bound to do just what other children were
doing. There was no private school at hand that was at all promising,
and it really was quite a dilemma. One day she asked Ella how she
would like to go to the public school.
“I’d rather go there than anywhere else in the whole world, except to
Norway or Switzerland,” she exclaimed. “May I go? May I go really?”
“We’ll think it over,” said the mother; and indeed it needed to be
thought over. Here was a little girl almost twelve years old. Other
children of twelve had been in school seven years; but this child’s
school life consisted thus far of one year with an hour a day of
arithmetic and French, and the rest of the time spent out of doors
with a big dog for company; of a year and a half more with the same
studies and a few months of Latin, but with much freedom as to her
coming and going, short sessions, and long play hours.
She had, then, a smattering of French; she had read “Fables” in
Latin; she had learned whatever chanced to strike her fancy in the
yellow geography and the pink grammar; and she was far beyond her age
in arithmetic. She could sketch fairly well, she could play on the
piano as well as children of her age were expected to do; she could
knit and crochet and do almost anything with her hands; she could
win the heart of cat or dog or bird; she could climb a mountain; and
she had read many hundreds of books, ranging all the way from “Songs
for Little Ones at Home” to a volume of the “Religions of the World,”
which she had discovered in an attic and thought more interesting
than the Sunday school “Question Book.” She had never been prepared
for any school, and how would she stand with other children who had
had seven years of regulation training? “Suppose that she was put
into a class of children much younger than herself,” thought the
mother. She could not have the child humiliated and unhappy. What was
the best thing to do?
Ella herself had been troubled all her life about her own ignorance.
When she was only five, she had begged to go to school because
the older children had assured her that she would grow up to be a
dunce—whatever that might be—if she did not go. Later, she would
have been even more anxious if there had not been so many books to
read and so many interesting things to do and to think about. Now
when the mother asked, “What should you do if you were put into a
class of little girls much younger than yourself?” she had her answer
all ready, “I’d study and study and study, till I knew so much they
wouldn’t have me there, and they would have to put me up higher.”
The mother concluded that the little girl would make her way, and the
public school was decided upon. She saw the principal of the school,
and he said, “Send her down Monday morning, and we will see where she
belongs.”
When Monday morning came, Ella started for school at the same time
with the other girls and walked down the same street with them. This
in itself was a delight. At last she was within the circle, and soon
she would be able to talk about the mysteries of school life as
easily as they.
She wore a cheery little red dress, a soft gray hat trimmed with
a bit of black velvet and a red quill. She carried a rather large
paper slate. It was made like a book and contained three sheets of
firm stiff paper slated on both sides. This was the very latest
thing in slates, and she was proud of it. She had one possession,
however, that made her feel even more elegant than the slate, and
that was her new slate pencil. Common slate pencils were hard and
inclined to scratch. Ella’s was made of wood, soft and agreeable to
the touch, and had “leads” of clay, which could be pushed up and
down by moving a little peg in a groove, just as if it had been a
pencil of solid gold. Ella dearly loved all things of the nature of
tools or machines, and she had saved her money for many days to buy
this pencil. Surely, such a choice article as this ought to give one
courage.
Cora was the oldest of the little group. There were six rooms in the
school building, and she was in Number Two, the next to the highest.
As they drew near to the schoolhouse, Cora began to give the new
pupil some good advice.
“The principal thinks you don’t know anything if you can’t do
examples,” she said, “and he’ll give you some awfully hard ones.
Girls that come here from private schools don’t know very much, and
you’ll probably be put in the Sixth Room. If you work hard, you can
be promoted, maybe before the end of the year.”
Ella began to feel so humble that she never thought of saying, “I can
do cube root, and you are only in denominate numbers,” and they went
silently up the stairs.
“That’s the room,” said Cora. “That’s the principal sitting at the
large desk, and there is the assistant at the smaller one.”
Ella wished that Cora would go in with her, but the older girl went
off to her own room, and Ella stood on the threshold, a rather shy
but exceedingly expectant little girl. Fortunately the assistant
looked up and came to her.
“This is Ella, I am sure,” she said. “I know your mother, and I am
glad to have her little daughter in the school.”
Then she introduced Ella to the principal. The girls and boys were
all afraid of him, and when Ella looked fearlessly up into his face
as if he was an old friend, and laid her hand in his, he really felt
a little awkward. He was not used to being treated in that way by
children.
“After the opening exercises we will see what you can do,” he
said. He motioned her to a chair just beyond the farther end of
the platform, near that of the pleasant assistant, and Ella seated
herself, so radiantly happy that she had no dread of even the hard
examples that were to come.
She looked about the room. It had many windows, and it seemed to her
enormously large. Blackboards ran around the four sides wherever the
windows and doors would permit, and on these blackboards were maps
and examples. Best of all, there were twenty-four desks—she counted
them over and over—and at each desk sat two girls or two boys, as the
case might be.
None of them paid the least attention to her, for this was the
highest class in the building. They would go to the high school in
the spring, and what did they care about a small newcomer who might
for all they knew, be condemned to the Sixth Room, or even be sent
to the intermediate school a little way off? They were only two
or three years older than Ella, but two or three years count for
a great length of time when one is not yet twelve, and she looked
at them with a deference that she had never felt for any grown-up.
Grown-ups belonged to a queer world of their own. They had different
notions and different ways of looking at things; but these boys and
girls, venerable as they were by age and position, were nevertheless
of her own world, and could be judged by standards that she could
understand.
It is to be feared that Ella did not pay very close attention to the
“opening exercises,” but older folk have sometimes paid no more, even
though with much smaller temptation.
But the assistant was beckoning to her and was handing her a paper.
“Do these examples,” she said; “or as many of them as you can,” she
added, for she, too, was of Cora’s opinion in regard to the children
who came from private schools.
The slate pencil that behaved like a gold one and the little girl
who wielded it worked their way rather scornfully through addition,
subtraction, multiplication, and division. Then came fractions,
decimals, compound numbers, interest, and square root; but now the
principal and the assistant called a halt and held a conference. Ella
heard snatches of their rather emphatic remarks.
“She won’t be twelve for two weeks—altogether too young for this
room.”
“The Third Room would be only play for her.”
“She has studied French and Latin,” said the assistant, “but she
knows very little of geography and grammar.”
“Never mind,” declared the principal decidedly. “If she can do
arithmetic, she can do anything. Put her into the Second Room.”