“You can’t expect me to turn a cart-wheel, surely, every time I remember it?” was my none too gracious inquiry. Then I sat down. “But what is it you want me to do?” I asked, as I sat studying his face, and I felt sorriest for him because he felt sorry for himself.
“That’s exactly the point,” he averred. “There doesn’t seem anything to do. But this can’t go on forever.”
“No,” I acknowledged. “It seems too much like history repeating itself.”
His head went down, at that, and it was quite a long time before he looked up at me again.
“I don’t suppose you can see it from my side of the fence?” he asked with a disturbing new note of humility in his voice.
“Not when you force me to stay on the fence,” I told him. He seemed to realize, as he sat there slowly moving his head up and down, that no further advance was to be made along that line. So he took a deep breath and sat up.
“Something will have to be done about getting a new teacher for that school,” he said with an appositeness which was only too painfully apparent.
“I’ve already spoken to two of the trustees,” I told 22 him. “They’re getting a teacher from the Peg. It’s to be a man this time.”
Instead of meeting my eye, he merely remarked: “That’ll be better for the boy!”
“In what way?” I inquired.