“I’ll be better able to tell you when I find out what it is,” said Priscilla, casting aside a Greek lexicon and taking up Stella’s letter. Stella Maynard had been one of their chums at Queen’s Academy and had been teaching school ever since.
“But I’m going to give it up, Anne dear,” she wrote, “and go to college next year. As I took the third year at Queen’s I can enter the Sophomore year. I’m tired of teaching in a back country school. Some day I’m going to write a treatise on ‘The Trials of a Country Schoolmarm.’ It will be a harrowing bit of realism. It seems to be the prevailing impression that we live in clover, and have nothing to do but draw our quarter’s salary. My treatise shall tell the truth about us. Why, if a week should pass without some one telling me that I am doing easy work for big pay I would conclude that I might as well order my ascension robe ‘immediately and to onct.’ ‘Well, you get your money easy,’ some rate-payer will tell me, condescendingly. ‘All you have to do is to sit there and hear lessons.’ I used to argue the matter at first, but I’m wiser now. Facts are stubborn things, but as some one has wisely said, not half so stubborn as fallacies. So I only smile loftily now in eloquent silence. Why, I have nine grades in my school and I have to teach a little of everything, from investigating the interiors of earthworms to the study of the solar system. My youngest pupil is four—his mother sends him to school to ‘get him out of the way’—and my oldest twenty—it ‘suddenly struck him’ that it would be easier to go to school and get an education than follow the plough any longer. In the wild effort to cram all sorts of research into six hours a day I don’t wonder if the children feel like the little boy who was taken to see the biograph. ‘I have to look for what’s coming next before I know what went last,’ he complained. I feel like that myself.
“And the letters I get, Anne! Tommy’s mother writes me that Tommy is not coming on in arithmetic as fast as she would like. He is only in simple reduction yet, and Johnny Johnson is in fractions, and Johnny isn’t half as smart as her Tommy, and she can’t understand it. And Susy’s father wants to know why Susy can’t write a letter without misspelling half the words, and Dick’s aunt wants me to change his seat, because that bad Brown boy he is sitting with is teaching him to say naughty words.
“As to the financial part—but I’ll not begin on that. Those whom the gods wish to destroy they first make country schoolmarms!
“There, I feel better, after that growl. After all, I’ve enjoyed these past two years. But I’m coming to Redmond.
“And now, Anne, I’ve a little plan. You know how I loathe boarding. I’ve boarded for four years and I’m so tired of it. I don’t feel like enduring three years more of it.
“Now, why can’t you and Priscilla and I club together, rent a little house somewhere in Kingsport, and board ourselves? It would be cheaper than any other way. Of course, we would have to have a housekeeper and I have one ready on the spot. You’ve heard me speak of Aunt Jamesina? She’s the sweetest aunt that ever lived, in spite of her name. She can’t help that! She was called Jamesina because her father, whose name was James, was drowned at sea a month before she was born. I always call her Aunt Jimsie. Well, her only daughter has recently married and gone to the foreign mission field. Aunt Jamesina is left alone in a great big house, and she is horribly lonesome. She will come to Kingsport and keep house for us if we want her, and I know you’ll both love her. The more I think of the plan the more I like it. We could have such good, independent times.
“Now, if you and Priscilla agree to it, wouldn’t it be a good idea for you, who are on the spot, to look around and see if you can find a suitable house this spring? That would be better than leaving it till the fall. If you could get a furnished one so much the better, but if not, we can scare up a few sticks of finiture between us and old family friends with attics. Anyhow, decide as soon as you can and write me, so that Aunt Jamesina will know what plans to make for next year.”
“I think it’s a good idea,” said Priscilla.
“So do I,” agreed Anne delightedly. “Of course, we have a nice boardinghouse here, but, when all’s said and done, a boardinghouse isn’t home. So let’s go house-hunting at once, before exams come on.”