Hence it happened that every morning Neale rang at the Taylors' front door, and when the maid let him in, went upstairs to the big front room on the top floor and there did whatever Miss Vanderwater told him to do. He was under her command from nine in the morning till noon, when he went home and had lunch with Mother, who always asked how school had gone, to which question Neale always made the same truthful answer that he guessed it was all right. At one he returned for two more hours with Miss Vanderwater. In this way he went through a series of Appleton's Readers, filled copy-books with thin Spencerian script, copied maps in colored ink with the coast-line shaded with scallops, did arithmetic on a slate and made very fair progress in learning German. German was much in the air in that locality.
Of course he did not spend all those years of his life, side by side with three other children without becoming intimately acquainted with them. But one of the instinctive watertight compartments in Neale's Anglo-Saxon mind was the one in which he kept his school separate from his life. He studied with the Taylor children, but he never dreamed of staying after hours to play with them. And yet he knew them infinitely better than any of the innumerable chance street-acquaintances with whom he flew kites or played one-old-cat. He knew instinctively, knew without thinking of it, knew to the marrow of his brutally normal bones that Jimmy Taylor was lame not only in his legs but in his character. Jimmy's delicacy, the great care taken of him, the fact that he always played in the house or back-yard with his sisters, made a sissy of him. That was the plain fact, and Neale was not one to refuse to admit plain facts. He was always kind to Jimmy, at least not unkind, but he was always secretly relieved when the front door shut behind him, hiding from him Jimmy's too-white hands, thin neck and querulous invalid's voice.
Of the two girls, Elsie was only a little kid, so much younger than Jimmy and Neale that they were barely aware of her existence. Myrtle, on the contrary, was very much there, a little girl whose comments on things never failed to arouse in Neale the profoundest astonishment. How could anybody think of such dotty things to say? You never had the least idea how anything was going to strike her, except that it was likely to strike her so hard that she made an awful fuss about it.
Myrtle lived in mortal terror of any little dirt, it seemed to Neale. One day in May, when they had had a picnic-lunch out in the back-yard of the Taylors' house, Myrtle carried on perfectly wild about a little flying white thing that had fallen into her glass of lemonade. Holy smoke! thought Neale, if she was afraid to get it out, he wasn't. So he fished it out with a spoon, and handed her back the glass. And what did she do? She made up an awful face and threw the lemonade on the ground! Neale was horrified at the waste.
And the day when Miss Vanderwater in their "natural history lesson" told them about angle-worms and how they keep the ground light and open, didn't Myrtle go off in another fit, with her eyes goggling and her fingers all stretched apart as though she felt angle-worms everywhere. She insisted that Miss Vanderwater must be wrong, that such an awful thing could not be true.
"Why, what do you mean?" asked Miss Vanderwater, for once, Neale noticed with satisfaction, as much at a loss as he.
"Ugh! Nasty!" cried Myrtle. "So all we eat has grown out of what angle-worms have vomited up! And so they're wriggling around, everywhere, touching everything that grows! I never dreamed of such a nasty thing! I'll never eat a radish again! It makes me sick to think of it—to put my mouth where a horrible old angle-worm has been rubbing all its slime off!"
"Now what do you think of that?" Neale asked himself.
Mostly, Myrtle was just the worst dead loss you ever saw; but once in a while you got some good out of her foolishness, like the time when she bit into a lovely-looking apple and laid it down, looking very white and sick at her stomach. She had bitten into a rotten place, and although Neale pointed out honestly to her that it was the only bad spot, and that the rest of the apple was a corker, she refused to touch it, or even to look at it. She said she never wanted to see another apple again as long as she lived! So Neale ate it to save it, sinking his strong teeth through the taut red skin, reveling in the craunchy, juicy white flesh, chewing away on huge crisp delicious mouthfuls. It was perhaps as well, too, that Myrtle hadn't tried to go on eating it, for Neale found another rotten spot. But he spit out the cottony-feeling, brown, bad-tasting stuff into the waste basket, and having got rid of it, went on with the apple, his zest undiminished to the last mouthful gnawed off the core. The idea of going back on apples because you struck a rotten place! Nobody asked you to eat the rotten places! It was perfectly easy to spit them out, or, if you saw them beforehand, to eat your way around them. He couldn't make anything out of Myrtle, at all.
But he didn't allow himself to be bothered by her, any more than by rotten spots in apples, and he escaped from her and from the whole genteel atmosphere of the Taylor household, the moment three o'clock came. The instant Miss Vanderwater said, "dismissed," he hurried home, left his books and hurried out again to hang around Number Two School, till four o'clock sent all its mingled conglomeration, ranging from tattered ragamuffins to little boys in white sailor-suits, yelling and whooping out to the vacant lots.