“What you going to do if this wind keeps up? It’s liable to blow for a week or two, this time of year.”
“Why––we’ll manage to get along all right. They’d probably be out playing in it anyway, if they weren’t in school.”
“Oh. And what about you?” Tom looked at her, blinking rapidly with his left eye that was growing bloodshot and watery.
“I? Why, I’ve lived here all my life, and I ought to be used to a little bad weather.”
“Hunh.” Tom shivered in the draught. “So have I lived here all my life; but I’ll be darned if I would want to sit in this shack all day, the way the wind whistles through it.”
“You might do it, though––if it was your only way of earning money,” Mary Hope suggested shrewdly.
“Well, I might,” Tom admitted, “but I sure would stop up a few cracks.”
“We’ve hardly got settled yet,” said Mary Hope. “I intend to stuff the cracks with rags just as soon as possible. Is your eye still paining? That dirt is miserable stuff to stick in a person’s eye. Shall I try and get it out? Yesterday I got some in mine, and I had an awful time.”
She dismissed the children primly, with a self-conscious dignity and some chagrin at their boorish clatter, their absolute ignorance of discipline. “I shall ring the bell in ten minutes,” she told them while they scuffled to the door. “I shall give you two minutes after the bell rings to get into your seats and be prepared for duty. Every minute after that must be made up after school.”