THE SHADOW OF A TRAGEDY
The ways of teachers like rainy days and growing pains belong to the inexplicable and inevitable. All teachers have ways, that is to be expected, it is the part of an Emmy Lou to adjust herself to meet, not to try to understand, these ways.
Miss Lizzie kept in, but that was only one of her ways, she had many others. Perhaps they were no more peculiar than the ways of her predecessors, but they were more alarming.
Miss Lizzie placed a deliberate hand on her call bell and, as its vibrations dinged and smote upon the shrinking tympanum, a rigid and breathless expectancy would pervade the silence of the Fourth Reader room.
Miss Lizzie was tall, she seemed to tower up and over one’s personality. One had no mind of her own, but one said what one thought Miss Lizzie wanted her to say. Sometimes one got it wrong. Then Miss Lizzie’s cold up-and-down survey smote one into a condition something akin to vacuity, until Miss Lizzie said briefly, “Sit down.”
Miss Lizzie never wasted a word. Miss Lizzie closed her lips. She closed them so their lines were blue. Her eyes were blue too, but not a pleasant blue. Miss Lizzie did not scold, she looked. She kept looking until one became aware of an elbow resting on the desk. In her room little girls must sit erect.
Sometimes she changed. It came suddenly. One day it came suddenly and Miss Lizzie boxed the little girl’s ears. The little girl had knocked over a pile of slates collected on the platform for marking.
Another time she changed. It was when the little girl brought a note from home because her ears were boxed. Miss Lizzie tore the note in pieces and threw them on the floor.