“Some schoolma’am you, for visiting committees to make notes on!” he exclaimed.
“I’m discharged, of course,” I remarked, after a moment’s silence.
“Oh, maybe not,” said Justice soothingly, as we reached home, and he turned off to go to his cabin.
“I don’t care if I am,” I cried savagely. “I hate that old Board so I wouldn’t work for them another day.” And I stalked into the house with my head in the air.
But somehow, after I had eaten my supper and begun to write this letter, I began to feel differently. The way the girls stood up for me this afternoon changed my whole attitude toward school teaching. To find out that they actually loved me was the biggest surprise I had ever had in my life. I had hated them so thoroughly along with the school teaching that it had never occurred to me that they did not feel the same way toward me. I suddenly hated myself for my impatience with their stupidity. Of course they were stupid—how could they be otherwise, poor, pitiful, ill-clad, overworked creatures, coming from such homes as they did? I stopped despising them and was filled only with pity for the narrow, colorless lives they led. That afternoon when they had told me, shyly and wistfully, how much they enjoyed my teaching, I was filled with guilty pangs, because I knew just how much I had enjoyed it. That impromptu picnic had quite won their hearts and broken down the barriers between us, and the trouble it had gotten me into crystallized their affection into expression. Now the ice was broken, and I would be able to get more out of them than ever before. The prospect of teaching began to have compensations.
Then suddenly I remembered. I would be discharged after the next meeting of the Board. I would have no opportunity of getting better acquainted with my pupils and leading them in the pleasant paths of knowledge. Just when the drink began to taste sweet I had to go and upset the cup!
And your Katherine, who had hated teaching the poor whites so fiercely all these months, buried her head on her arms and cried bitterly at the thought of having to give it up!
Yours, in tears,
Katherine.
HINPOHA TO KATHERINE
Brownell College, Nov. 25, 19—.