"This is it, isn't it, honey?" she asked with the flashing smile for which her children, among other things, adored her.
"Yes, ma'am, thank you, teacher," said the thirteen-year-old gratefully; and went off to a corner, where she sat till closing time entranced over her own happy choice, "The Adventures of Peter Rabbit," with colored pictures dotting it satisfactorily. The Liberry Teacher knew that it was her duty to go over and hypnotize the child into reading something which would lead more directly to Browning and Strindberg. But she didn't.
"Poor little wop!" she thought unacademically. "Let her be happy in her own way!"
And the Liberry Teacher herself went on being unhappy in her own way.
"I'm just a battered bisque doll!" she repeated to herself bitterly.
But she was wrong. One is apt to exaggerate things on a workaday Saturday afternoon. She looked more like a pretty bisque figurine; slim and clear-cut, and a little neglected, perhaps, by its owners, and dressed in working clothes instead of the pretty draperies it should have had; but needing only a touch or so, a little dusting, so to speak, to be as good as ever.
"Eva never was as pretty as I was!" her rebellious thoughts went on. You think things, you know, that you'd never say aloud. "I'm sick of elevating the public! I'm sick of working hard fifty-one weeks out of fifty-two for board and lodging and carfare and shirtwaists and the occasional society of a few girls who don't get any more out of life than I do! I'm sick of libraries, and of being efficient! I want to be a real girl! Oh, I wish—I wish I had a lot of money, and a rose-garden, and a husband!"
The Liberry Teacher was aghast at herself. She hadn't meant to wish such a very unmaidenly thing so hard. She jumped up and dashed across the room and began frantically to shelf-read books, explaining meanwhile with most violent emphasis to the listening Destinies:
"I didn't—oh, I didn't mean a real husband. It isn't that I yearn to be married to some good man, like an old maid or a Duchess novel. I—I just want all the lovely things Eva has, or any girl that marries them, without any trouble but taking care of a man. One man couldn't but be easier than a whole roomful of library babies. I want to be looked after, and have time to keep pretty, and a chance to make friends, and lovely frocks with lots of lace on them, and just months and months and months when I never had to do anything by a clock—and—and a rose-garden!"
This last idea was dangerous. It isn't a good thing, if you want to be contented with your lot, to think of rose-gardens in a stuffy city library o' Saturdays; especially when where you were brought up rose-gardens were one of the common necessities of life; and more especially when you are tired almost to the crying-point, and have all the week's big sisters back of it dragging on you, and all its little sisters to come worrying at you, and—time not up till six.