“Robert!” Babbie’s tone was very hopeless. “Can’t you understand that Madeline is about as likely to stick as Prexy is to dance a hornpipe at to-morrow’s chapel?” She sighed deeply. “It must be terrible to be a reformer; you have to be so hopeful about people’s turning over a new leaf—whether it’s Madeline sticking, or a dreadful old Frenchman beating his wife, or the angelic-looking Rafael learning his alphabet.”
“Haven’t they learned that yet?” asked Madeline incredulously.
“Certainly not,” retorted Babbie. “You jabbered Italian all the time to them, and that spoiled them so that they never would study for the other teachers.”
“I regret my reprehensible familiarity with their mother tongue,” announced Madeline grandiloquently, “and I hereby make due reparation.” Her glance wandered around the table. “I elect Eleanor Watson to take the prize class.”
“Tell me about it,” Eleanor asked. “I don’t understand at all. I didn’t know there were any foreigners in Harding.”
So they told her about Factory Hill, about Young-Man-Over-the-Fence and his Twelfth-Night party that accidentally started the fund for the club-house, about the education clause in the new factory laws, the club organization, which was now so efficiently managed by the Student’s Aid’s prize beneficiary—a senior who had earned every bit of her college course—and finally about Rafael and Giuseppi and Pietro and the other Italian boys, who scorned their French and Polish, Portuguese and German comrades, and insisted upon their own little club—a concession in return for which they played truant, refused to study or pay attention, and quarreled violently on the slightest provocation. They would have to be dropped from the factory pay-roll, according to the new law, if they did not speedily mend their ways and learn to read and write.
“Why, I should be almost afraid to be left alone with them,” Eleanor exclaimed at the end of the recital. “Do they carry daggers?”
“No, they’re not quite so barbaric as that,” Mr. Thayer told her. “They are just lively boys, who’ve been brought up with strong race prejudices and no chance to have the jolly good times that would make them forget their feuds and revolts. They work hard because their fathers make them, and because it’s the regular way of living for them. But being forced to study they consider the most bitter tyranny. The factory inspectors have had their cases up twice now, and if I can’t make a good report on them at Christmas I shall have to let them go. I hate to, because they can’t get other work here, and if they leave their homes and friends, nine out of the ten will probably go straight to the bad.”
“There’s your chance, Eleanor,” Jim told her eagerly.
“But, Jim, I can’t ‘stick,’ as Babbie calls it. I’m here only for a little visit. My music——”