One evening at the close of the first term in the First Room, Ella did some counting and measuring of paragraphs. Then she said:
“Mother, we have been over only twenty-two pages this whole term. Of course there are exercises besides, but what we have really learned, if it was printed together solidly, would make only seven.”
“I will speak to the assistant if you like,” said the mother, “and ask her if she can arrange to give you longer lessons.”
“Oh, no,” cried Ella in some alarm. “If the lessons were longer, there wouldn’t be any time to read and play and crochet and draw and go to see the other girls and have them come to see me. But I was just thinking how it would sound if I should get to be a famous woman some day and any one asked how much grammar I used to do in a term, and you would have to say, ‘Seven pages.’ Then people would think I must have been horribly stupid.”
“Don’t worry,” advised the mother with a smile. “Before you are a famous woman, there will be time enough to go over more pages. Just learn everything thoroughly. That’s all you have to do now.”
“I do learn everything thoroughly,” declared Ella. “I have to, if I am going to stay at the head of the class—and I am,” she added with emphasis. “Anyway, I like grammar. I don’t like learning rules, of course, and when I give an illustration that is just as good as the one in the book and a great deal more sensible, I don’t see why it should be called wrong. I recited, ‘The adverbial element may be an adverbial clause denoting time.’ The illustration was ‘While I was musing, the fire burned.’ Now when you’re musing, the fire doesn’t burn, it goes out, or at any rate it burns low; so I said, ‘While I was musing, the fire burned low.’ The sentence contained an adverbial clause, and it was good sense and the way fires behave, and it sounded better; but it was counted half a failure. I don’t think that was fair; but I do like parsing and analyzing. It’s real fun to shake a sentence all to pieces till it has to tell you just what it means and what it didn’t intend you should ever know. It’s as much fun as any game. But when an illustration illustrates, it does illustrate. It’s right, and I don’t see how it could be any more right.”
“Perhaps when you become that famous woman, you can write a grammar that will keep every little girl at the head of the class and never allow any one to fail.”
“But I don’t believe I’d care so much about being at the head if every one else was there. Do you think it’s selfish to want to be at the head?”
“How should you feel if some other girl was always at the head? That’s the way to find out,” said the mother.
“I suppose I shouldn’t like it,” Ella replied thoughtfully. “But I like the principal, and I have reason to think that he likes me, and he would be disappointed if I failed on purpose and went down. It would not be right to disappoint him, would it?”