"What are all flowers for?" I demanded again.
"But I thought 'twas a school."
"It is, but it's a new kind."
"Where's the books?"
"The children are going to be under six; we shan't have reading and writing."
We sat down to work together, marking out and cutting brown paper envelopes for the children's sewing or weaving, binding colored prints with gold paper and putting them on the wall with thumb tacks, and arranging all the kindergarten materials tidily on the shelves of the closets. Next day was a holiday and she begged to come again. I consented and told her that she might bring a friend if she liked and we would lunch together.
"I guess not," she said, with just a hint of jealousy in her tone. "You and I get on so well that mebbe we'd be bothered with another girl messin' around, and she'd be one more to wash up for after lunch."
From that moment, the Corporal, as I called her, was a stanch ally and there was seldom a day in the coming years when she did not faithfully perform all sorts of unofficial duties, attaching herself passionately to my service with the devotion of a mother or an elder sister. She proved at the beginning a kind of travelling agent for the school haranguing mothers on the street corners and addressing the groups of curious children who gathered at the foot of the school steps.
"You'd ought to go upstairs and see the inside of it!" she would exclaim. "It's just like going around the world. There's a canary bird, there's fishes swimmin' in a glass bowl, there's plants bloomin' on the winder sills, there's a pianner, and more'n a million pictures! There's closets stuffed full o' things to play and work with, and whatever the scholars make they're goin' to take home if it's good. There's a play-room with red rings painted on the floor and they're going to march and play games on 'em. She can play the pianner standin' up or settin' down, without lookin' at her hands to see where they're goin'. She's goin' to wear white, two a week, and I got Miss Lannigan to wash 'em for her for fifteen cents apiece. I tell her the children 'round here's awful dirty and she says the cleaner she is the cleaner they'll be.... No, 'tain't goin' to be no Sunday School," said the voluble Corporal. "No, 'tain't goin' to be no Mission; no, 'tain't goin' to be no Lodge! She says it's a new kind of a school, that's all I know, and next Monday'll see it goin' full blast!"
It was somewhat in this fashion, that I walked joyously into the heart of a San Francisco slum, and began experimenting with my newly-learned panaceas.