“And I’d like to have a tutor,” Dicky declared. “Somebody to read to you and answer all your questions. I should think that would be great.”
“I don’t believe you would like school long, Maida,” Rosie went on. “At least if you went to the same kind of school we go to. Isn’t that so, Arthur?”
Arthur nodded. “They’re no fun.”
“When the teacher puts the arithmetic problems on the blackboard,” Rosie said, “I always get them done in five minutes. I’m good in arithmetic and they’re almost always correct. Then there’s nothing for me to do until the rest of the children have finished but read in my Reader that I’ve read through a million times; or my Geography that I have read just as often; or in the Supplementary Reading that I know just as well.”
“That’s stupid,” Maida decided reflectively.
“And then, when we have to write compositions, I nearly die,” Rosie went on in the same discontented vein. “I hate compositions. I never can think of anything to say. I always have to stay after school—”
“Why Rosie, you write the most wonderful letters,” Maida protested. “Oh how I enjoyed getting them abroad! You told me all the things I wanted to know and how I used to laugh at them too.”
“Oh well, letters aren’t writing!” Rosie said scornfully. “Anybody can write letters.”
“I can’t,” Arthur declared, “I hate writing letters.”
“I don’t think it’s easy to write letters,” Laura interrupted, “although Maida and Rosie do it so easily. I think they’re just as hard as a composition. If you can write a letter, you ought to be able to write a composition, and if you can write a composition, you ought to be able to write a letter.”