When Jean hoped she would never have to teach, they looked at her venomously and said it was a wonderful work for which few were naturally fitted. They were like wax-works, most of them, rather scarred and worn, wound up and kept going by the fear of a younger generation, a newer output from the educational factories, who might usurp their places.
The only bright spot was the translation with Professor Renshaw. Jean buried herself for hours in the library and even succeeded sometimes in escaping dinner on the ground that it was too far to go home and back again in the evening.
But as the weeks passed and the work neared completion, she found it difficult to keep the hope that every letter from Pat held out:
"Something will happen. It must. You see, Horace will rescue you yet."
"Tell him to hurry," Jean wrote back toward the end of August. "I feel the walls of an ungraded country school closing about me."
With her mother, Jean never discussed the subject, for she knew that every night, to the long list of blessings Martha enumerated and the few favors she asked of Heaven, was added a petition that "a way would be opened up to Jean." It made Jean furious to be prayed over and sometimes she felt that having to teach would be almost compensated by proving the inefficacy of prayer.
But when the release came, Jean forgot her anger, swooped down upon Martha in the kitchen, took the paring knife from her hands, and waltzed her mother about the room.
"Now, mummy, you've simply got to stop. I cannot divulge the greatest news of the age while you pick worms out of an apple."
"There aren't any worms in these. I made Joe take those others back and change them. It was robbery. Well, dear, what is it?"
"Mummy, you've got to promise to be excited. I'm just about ready to go up in smoke."