“But I don’t like reading aloud.”
“Neither do I like reading aloud. I do a great many things I don’t like to do.”
“I’ll read it to myself—then the rest can do the same.”
“I don’t like to read aloud a thing that I have read again and again. I don’t like to play games that you little ones like. I don’t care to play for you, when each one can do it for himself.”
Miss Lane looked at Jennie gravely. The little girl’s lip began to quiver, her eyes filled.
“Oh, Miss Lane!” she faltered.
“Suppose I were never willing to do anything for your pleasure, Jennie, just because I did not fancy it, wouldn’t you think me a little selfish?”
The tears were rolling over Jennie’s cheeks now, and Miss Lane sat in silence, wishing the child’s sensitiveness were not so exquisite. The gentlest chiding touched the quick—it was almost a cruelty to rebuke, even when rebuke was needed. That word “selfish” had set Jennie’s heart-strings to quivering; and thoughtlessness, as much as anything else, had prompted her first speech; so she sat downcast, bearing her pain in silence, while her teacher was almost as much grieved as she.
“I think it would not be quite kind to sit alone and read to yourself all the evening, when the rest are so anxious to finish the story, and you know but one can have the book at a time.”
There was no answer; but Jennie had forgotten her great repugnance to reading aloud in remembering that only the day before, Miss Lane had left her book for an hour, to tell baby stories and read Mother Goose to Rosie, when she was lying peevish and sick in bed.