"There is only now and then a teacher who believes that little children are capable of understanding the application of a story. I can't understand why, if that is the best method of managing a primary class, people take the trouble to have a separate room and another superintendent. Why don't they stay in the main department? I always thought that one of the special values of a separate room was that the lesson may be given in a distinct and natural tone of voice, and with illustrations and accompaniments that cannot be used, where many classes are together, without disturbing some of them.
"If, on the other hand, the sub-teachers are not expected to give the lesson, but only to teach certain opening recitations, then you have the spectacle of employing a dozen or twenty persons to do the work of one. Then there's another thing; our room is not suited to the plan of subdivision, and there is only occasionally a room that has been built to order, which is—"
"On the whole, you do not at all believe in the plan of subdivision," Dr. Dennis said, laughing.
And then callers came, and Marion took her leave.
"I am not quite sure whether I like him or dislike him, or whether I am afraid of him just a trifle." This she said to the girls as they went home from prayer-meeting. "He has a queer way of branching off from the subject entirely, just when you suppose that you have interested him. Sometimes he interrupts with a sentence that sounds wonderfully as if he might be quizzing you. He is a trifle queer anyway. I don't believe I love him with all the zeal that a person should bestow on a pastor. I am loyal on that subject theoretically, but practically I stand in awe."
"I don't see how you can think him sarcastic," Flossy said. "There is not the least tinge of that element in his nature, I think; at least I have never seen it. I don't feel afraid of him, either; once I thought I should; but he is so gentle and pleasant, and meets one half way, and understands what one wants to tell better than they understand themselves. Oh, I like him ever so much. He is not sarcastic to me."
Marion looked down upon the fair little girl at her side with a smile that had a sort of almost motherly tenderness in it, as she said, gently:
"One would be a very bear to think of quizzing a humming-bird, you know. It would be very silly in him to be sarcastic to you."
Eurie interrupted the talk:
"What is the matter with the prayer-meetings?" she asked. "Do any of you know? I do wish we could do something to make them less forlorn. I am almost homesick every time I go. If there were more people there the room wouldn't look so desolate. Why on earth don't the people come?"