It was a warm June day. Milly had been reading to Mrs. Kemp, who was sewing. The book was "Romola." Milly had found quite dull its solid pages of description of old Florence sparsely relieved by conversation, and after a futile attempt to discover more thrilling matter farther on had abandoned the book altogether in favor of talk, which always interested her more than anything else in the world.
"Why should I go to school?" she repeated.
"You are only sixteen."
"Seventeen—in September," Milly promptly corrected.
Mrs. Kemp laughed.
"I didn't finish school until I was eighteen."
"School is so stupid," Milly sighed, with a little grimace. "I hate getting things out of books."
She had never been distinguished in school,—far from it. Only by real labor had she been able to keep up with her classes.
"I guess the schools I went to weren't much good," she added.
She saw herself behind a desk at the high school she had last attended in St. Louis. In front of her sat a dried, sallow, uncheerful woman of great age, ready to pounce upon her and expose her ignorance before the jeering class. The girls and the boys at the school were not "refined"—she knew that now. No, she did not want any more school of that sort.... Besides, what use could an education be, if she were not to teach? And Milly had not the faintest idea of becoming a teacher.