But this country school was conducted so differently from the city school that Carolyn May found herself quite puzzled on many points.
She had to divide her desk with another little girl, Freda Payne. Freda was a black-eyed, snappy little girl who could whisper out of the corner of her mouth without the teacher’s seeing her do it. She instructed Carolyn May from time to time regarding this new world the city child had entered into.
“Goodness me! didn’t you ever have a slate before?” she whispered to Carolyn May.
“No,” the little city girl confessed. “They don’t let us use them where I went to school. They make too much noise. And, then, they aren’t clean.”
“Clean! Course they’re clean, if you keep ’em clean,” declared Freda fiercely.
She showed the stranger the bottle of water she kept in her desk and the sponge with which she washed her slate.
“But the sponge is dirty. And it smells!” ventured Carolyn May, with a slight shudder. She had heard of germs, and the mussy-looking bit of sponge was not an attractive object.
“’Tain’t neither!” snapped Freda, making her denial positive with two negatives. “The boys spit on their slates and wipe ’em off on their jacket sleeves. That’s nasty. But us girls is clean.”
Carolyn May could not see it, however, and she ignored her own slate.
“You can’t use that pencil to write with on paper,” Freda caught her up with another admonition.