“It isn’t measles. I won’t have measles. The hall was hot and it made my face burn when I was there, and it just kept on burning”; but the longer she said it was not measles, the faster the red spots came out.
“It isn’t fair,” she wailed. “It isn’t the least bit fair that I should have measles when Beejay hasn’t. We have so many things to do, I can’t be sick.”
But the red spots grew brighter and brighter. It was only two weeks before the end of the school year, and Ella had had her last day in the “Private School for Young Ladies.”
CHAPTER X
LIKE OTHER GIRLS
There was something that Ella wanted even more than she had wanted the box of tin soldiers or the ride in a swan boat, and this was that she might go to the public school. It was quite the custom for a public school girl to invite a younger child to go with her for half a day. If the child behaved well, the teacher made no objection, and perhaps gave her a book of pictures to look at. If her notions of order were not quite up to the mark, the teacher would draw the little hostess aside and say:
“I don’t believe you’d better bring her again till she is older. She is rather too young to have to keep quiet so long.”
Oddly enough, it had happened that Ella had never visited the public school, and all the glory of something unknown was about it. Of course she had heard many school stories from her playmates. She knew that it was carried on in a businesslike fashion, that children did not choose their books by the color of the covers or recite what they pleased and when they pleased, and go home whenever they liked; but that lessons had to be learned, and had to be recited when the time for recitation had come. She knew that once in a while the superintendent of schools came to examine the pupils, and that he listened to their answers as if whether they were right or wrong was really an important matter. One day, after his kindly examination of a class in which were several of Ella’s playmates, they came home at noon in great glee. After his examination, he had said to the teacher—but quite loud enough for the whole room to hear,
“The children in your class have done so well that I am going to ask you if you won’t take them out to the grove this afternoon for a little picnic.”
They had asked the teacher if Ella might go with them, but she did not care to be responsible for any more children and had said no, the picnic was for the pupils only.
Now Ella was free every afternoon and could have gone to a picnic six days in the week, if there had been one to go to; but somehow this was different, and the tears really came into her eyes that day when she thought of the whole class having such a good time from which she herself was shut out. Some of these same little picnickers envied her for coming home at one o’clock or even earlier; but nothing would have induced them to express such a thought. The city was very proud of her public schools. There was a general feeling that the work of private schools was not so good; and these little girls held their heads very high because they were parts of the great public school system.