The special attraction for the afternoon was a conference of primary class teachers. They were out in full force, and were ready for any questions that might fill the hearts and the mouths of eager learners. Our girls had each their special favorites among these leaders. Ruth found herself attracted and deeply interested in every word that Mrs. Clark uttered. Marion was making a study of both Mrs. Knox and Miss Morris, and found it difficult to tell which attracted her most. Even Eurie was ready for this meeting. She had never been able to shake off the thought of Miss Rider, and her eager enthusiasm in this work, while Flossy had been fascinated and carried away captive by the magnetic voice and manner of Mrs. Partridge.
"She makes me glow," Flossy said, in trying to explain the feeling to the calmer Ruth. "Her life seems to quiver all through me, and make me long to reach after it; to have the same power which she has over the hearts of wild uncared-for children."
And Ruth looked down on the exquisite bit of flesh and blood beside her, and thought of her elegant home and her elegant mother, and of all the softening and enervating influences of her city life, and laughed. How little had she in common with such a work as that to which Mrs. Partridge had given her soul!
Keeping her eyes open, as she had planned to do, this same Flossy saw as she was passing down the aisle the hungry face of one of her boys, as she had mentally called the Arabs with whom her life had brushed on the Sunday morning The word just described it still, a hungry face like one hanging wistfully around the outskirts of a feast in which he had no share. Flossy let go her hold of Ruth's arm and darted toward him.
"How do you do?" she said, in winning voice, before he had even seen her. "I am real glad to see you again. If you will come with me I will get a seat for you. A lady is going to speak this afternoon who has five hundred boys in her class in Sunday-school."
Now the Flossy of two weeks ago, if she could have imagined herself in any such business, would have been utterly disgusted with the result, and gone away with her pretty nose very high.
The boy turned his dirty face toward her and said, calmly:
"What a whopper!"
The experience of a lifetime could not have answered more deftly:
"You come and see. I am almost certain she will tell us about some of them."