“They do not.”
This was easy and sensible, and about things that even very little girls could understand, but this new grammar began,
“English grammar treats of the principles and usages of the English Language,” and went on to say that grammar was divided into four parts, “Orthography, Etymology, Syntax, and Prosody.” Her grammar at home declared that
“A noun’s the name of anything,
As school, or garden, hoop, or swing.”
The new grammar remarked that “Letters cannot be too carefully distinguished from elementary sounds.” Ella wondered why. She had known letters ever since she could remember, and she had never confused them with elementary sounds—whatever elementary sounds might be. How could things be so important when they were not?
The class took their places around the room. Somehow there seemed to be more of them than when they were seated. Ella remembered days when she did not have to recite her French lesson because the young lady who was for a little while the rest of the class had failed to come. With all these boys and girls in the class, there would plainly be no such good fortune. There would be no hurrying to learn her lessons and then being excused to go home early, for classes came at just such times, and Ida had told her that if a pupil stayed away, or was excused, she would be marked zero for the lesson.
Ella sat and listened while the class recited. She grew more and more discouraged with every recitation. Not one girl or boy asked a question as to the meaning of these queer statements. Ella supposed that was because they understood it all—and she did not. How could she ever go on with them? She was almost sorry that she had ever come to a public school. She was a plucky little girl, however, and when she went home at noon, she set to work bravely to learn her spelling lesson, and never a word did she say about the inferiority of public schools to private.
Ida had told her that in the intermediate school the children had to learn the words of the spelling lesson in order and “put them out” to themselves, but that this was not done in the grammar school, and Ella was quite at ease about this lesson, for she could not see how there could be anything “queer and cranky” in a recitation in spelling. There was not, and at the end of the lesson the teacher called the names for reports. Ella had often written in her little diary, when she could not think of anything else to say, “Had a perfect lesson, didn’t fail,” or “Didn’t have a very good lesson and the teacher was cross”; but to have her name called and have her report recorded in definite figures in the big book that lay on the table—that was quite a different matter. She answered shyly but happily, “One hundred.”
After the spelling came twenty minutes of writing; and now the little newcomer was in despair, for she knew just how poor her handwriting was. She knew that no two letters were of the same height or slanted the same way. She knew that it made her hand ache to write half a page, and she knew that the writing was hardly the least bit better since the seminary days. She opened the new copybook at the first page, and behold there was the old familiar sentence, “Honesty is the best policy,” printed in the fashionable “Spencerian hand” with all its rounded flourishes. She had long ago tried her best to copy this very sentence and had failed. What would the teacher say? Perhaps the principal would even put her back into a lower room.