"A misapprehension?" jumped the girl. Very painstakingly then and there she began to 62 explore the remaining piece of cake in her hand, tugging at its sponginess, peering under its frostedness. Then suddenly with a little quick gasp of relief she popped the sweet morsel into her mouth and smacked her lips upon it "Oh, no," she beamed. "It tastes perfectly all right to me!"
Like a word slipping hopelessly down a poem toward whatever chosen rhyme its Poet has already in mind, the Young Doctor suddenly found himself bumping rather perilously close to the one big wild hoot of laughter that had evidently been lurking for him in the situation even from the very first. In a really desperate effort to fend himself as long as possible from such an undignified disaster he hastened in all sincerity to rewrap himself in his stiffest professional manner.
"Well, what about this 'Lisa' and 'Jonathan' business?" he questioned with unmistakable reproach.
"Oh, shucks!" shrugged the girl. "This tiresome Lisa and Jonathan, their whole parents are bakers! But as for me," she lowered her voice, and thrust out her hands with a soft, appealing gesture. "But as for me, until 63to-night, for four whole weeks I cry such salt into my food I cannot eat! Homesickness, yes!" she nodded with a quick little catch of her breath. "In all the world no one to speak with except one fat lady and one thin lady and Lisa and Jonathan and Peter, and—" In an extra impulse of confidence not unmixed evidently with a certain flare of pride she slid forward a little on the step. "I am Montessori!" she said.
"What?" snapped the Young Doctor. "Why, what nonsense!" he said. "Why, what are you talking about? 'Montessori' is a—a system! And she's an Italian, too, I mean."
"Yes, truly so," conceded the girl. "And in time if the homeache can be assuaged I shall then learn the system—and remain yet a Norwegian."
"Oh, you mean you are a Montessori student?" brightened the Young Doctor.
"Even so," said the girl. "I cannot wait to learn everything. From here, after I have duly studied little Lisa, little Peter, and all the others, whose minds most happily are of a perfect brightness, I must then go on to the sadder 64schools, and to that most wonderful place in your Massachusetts where such first brain work of all was made on the little children. It is that in Norway," she winced, "I have a little brother. Our father makes much money," she added with apparent irrelevance. "And spends much and gives much. And once he married him a new wife, and there are many new children. And one of them, this little little brother, so gold, so blue, so pinky, all day long he sits and—isn't," she finished perfectly simply.
"Why—why, that's too bad," said the Young Doctor.
"Yes, very bad," mused the girl. "But some of these ideas here are of a great cleverness. I do not of course get any of it right yet," she acknowledged. "But some of it is quite sporting like a game. With these toys, now," she pointed, "and all glad things like industries, and the live cat, and the dog, and grasses and the flowers, you leave the little child quite loose, it seems, only watching him, watching him very close, one day, two days, a hundred if it seems best. And wherever he shall in finality—in finality—'gravitate,' 65is it that you say? to the sweet flowers, or the wood blocks, or the gay, smoothen cat, there it is that the one big chance of his salvation will most surely be found. But the engine, or the blocks or the smoothen cat must not be forced on him, it is so you understand? Of such there would make no message to his development. But out of everything, it is, that he himself must gravitate to it!"