Victorine understood what “speak slowly” meant, and so she said very deliberately, “The—Delphic—Horricul.”
“So you are learning about the Delphic Oracle. And what are you going to do when you grow up?” was my next query.
“I’m going to work in the laundry like muvver!”
We went into another classroom; here more ragged unwashed clothes greeted me on every hand. I had no need to ask the subject of the lesson, for the girls were facing a blackboard on which was written “The Characteristics of Shelley’s Poetry.”
After I had seen more tatters in a third room, where a lesson was being given on “Infinitive Verbs,” I said to the head mistress, “If I had this school, do you know what I should do? I should take a class at a time, and give out needles and cotton, and tell them to do the best they could to sew up the rags in their dresses and their pinafores. I would not mind if they did not put on patches even to a thread in the regulation way, so long as they made some attempt to run together those rents and slits and yawning gaps. I would let the other lessons go till this was done. And I would not let a girl take her place in a class in the morning till she had mended as well as she could any rents she had worn to school.”
The head mistress shook her head. “That would not be practical; you see, it isn’t in the Syllabus.”
I don’t pretend to understand the inwardness of syllabuses, but I couldn’t help wondering if there wasn’t an opening here for a new one. While so much unpractical stuff is taught to the poorer classes in elementary schools, is it any wonder that the children know so little of the things appertaining to daily life?
Eileen didn’t exactly suffer from rags. She was as neat and patched and wholesome as her clean, sensible grandmother could make her; but she was forlorn-looking to the last degree. One of the first things I tried to do was to get her to take a little pride in her personal appearance. And it was wonderful how she responded. With her hair released from the uncompromising, tight screw that had been kept in place by three big iron-looking hair-pins, and done higher up, and more loosely over the forehead, and a pretty collar and blue bow for her Sunday blouse, she looked a different being.
“Poor little thing, she has never had a soul take any interest in how she looks,” Ursula remarked to me. “And even though we’re not allowed to cast our bread upon the waters, nowadays, they haven’t said anything officially about ribbons.” And so we searched our drawers for suitable finery that might bring a little colour into Eileen’s hitherto drab outlook. Virginia followed suit, remarking that she liked to scatter little seeds of kindness by the wayside, since you never know what may result.
True! She didn’t!