“That’s right, miss. The boy’s always had his heart set on it, and as I says to Mr. Tinker, ‘Don’t oppose him.’ And Henry shows wonderful talent for it, miss. Wonderful.”
Jane was going to ask how a precocious talent for undertaking manifested itself, when Miss Farrel appeared.
“Perhaps, Mrs. Tinker, you might work just now in one of the other rooms,” she suggested with dignity. “You may return in an hour.”
And then she turned her attention to Jane.
The old lady began by a plaintive little discourse on Jane’s shortcomings, and on the future disasters that they would most certainly lead to. She tried to sound severe and cold, but now and then she said “my dear,” and once she laid her small, old hand on Janey’s. It was so difficult to be severe with Jane.
“And now, Jane, we must review all last week’s work. You see how much time you lose?”
The lesson began; but it turned out that Jane was able to answer very nearly every question that Miss Farrel asked.
“Now, you see? Oh, if you would only put your mind on your work, my dear, it would really be a pleasure to teach you. My dear old teacher used to say—”
And here, veering away from the discussion of altitudes and bases, the good dame began to prattle in the friendliest way about her own girlhood, and about the little school she used to go to, way up in the country, where half the tuition was paid in salt pork and other provisions, and about her father and brothers. Everybody seemed to drift into talking about their own affairs to Jane, and Jane remembered everything they told her. There was hardly a soul in Frederickstown whose general history she was not familiar with; very simple histories for the most part, for the inhabitants of Frederickstown were simple souls, yet each had its measure of comedy and tragedy, and each had its mysterious relationship to the character of its confiding narrator.
So now Miss Farrel told her about her sister, Miss Elizabeth, who was, she said, so much the cleverer and better in every way—the last of her whole family, and crippled with inflammatory rheumatism; and about her wonderful cat, Amaryllis, and so on, and so on.