There was not even a real teacher, only an old lady who called one “my dear.”
At home Emmy Lou cried with her head buried in Aunt Cordelia’s new bolster sham; for how could she confess to Hattie and to Rosalie that it was a parlour and a lap-board?
Upon consultation, Uncle Charlie said, let her do as she pleased, since damage to her seemed to be inevitable either way. So, Emmy Lou, rejoicing, departed one morning for the Grammar School.
Public school being different from private school, Emmy Lou at once began to learn things. For instance, at Grammar School, one no longer speaks of boys in undertones. One assumes an attitude of having always known boys. At Grammar School, classes attend chapel. There are boys in Chapel, still separated from the girls, to be sure, after the manner of the goats from the sheep; but after one learns to laugh from the corners of one’s eyes at boys, a dividing line of mere aisle is soon abridged. Watching Rosalie, Emmy Lou discovered this.
There was a boy in Chapel whom she knew, but it takes courage to look out of the corners of one’s eyes, and Emmy Lou could only find sufficient to look straight, which is altogether a different thing. But the boy saw her. Emmy Lou looked away quickly.
Once the boy’s name had been Billy; later, at dancing school, it was Willie; now, the Principal who conducted Chapel Exercises called him William.
Emmy Lou liked this Principal. He had white hair, and when it fell into his eyes he would stand it wildly over his head, running his fingers through its thickness; but one did not laugh because of greater interest in what he said.
Emmy Lou asked Rosalie the Principal’s name, but Rosalie was smiling backward at a boy as the classes filed out of Chapel. Afterward she explained that his name was Mr. Page.
At Grammar School Emmy Lou continued to learn things. The pupils of a grammar school abjure school bags; a Geography now being a folio volume measurable in square feet, it is the thing to build upon its basic foundation an edifice of other text-books, and carry the sum total to and fro on an aching arm.
Nor do grammar-school pupils bring lunch; they bring money, and buy lunch—pies, or doughnuts, or pickles—having done with the infant pabulum of primary bread and butter.