Will did not know how to answer without seeming to question or comment, so there came a pause; then he said:
“This Coakley was an electioneering agent of Garvey’s, and doesn’t know enough to teach babies. He seems to have turned up suddenly wanting help, and the Judge is willing enough to keep him on hand and under obligations until next election.”
Miss Northrop stopped short and looked at him with brows a little raised, and her bearing became impalpably more distant.
“But I cannot enter into contest with—these men for permission to teach school here,” she said.
She was right, in her quick feeling that Will Strong’s training could not have made work and discomfort and contact with vulgarity seem outside the sphere of women. If it had been one of his own sisters he would have said: “Oh, well, we have to take the world as we find it. Brace up, little girl; I’ll put you safe through, and you’ll find it’s not so bad, after all.”
But what he said to Winifred Northrop was: “It is outrageous! Such brutes as Garvey have no business to look at a lady! If you really prefer not to take the school,” he went on, with some embarrassment, “I hope you will call on me to help you in any other way; but if you want the school you shall have it, and no annoyance with it that I can help.”
Miss Northrop repented that she had repented her confidence. “I remembered that you were kind of old, Will”—and her manner was irresistibly winning when she said such a thing—“but you are so very kind now that you make me ashamed. I only meant to ask you what I must do. Yes, I must take this position if I can, for I have no alternative.”
“There is nothing for you to do,” he said. “It is my place, as an officer of the school, to see that its rightful teacher is not defrauded.”
“So it is,” she said, relieved. “But I am none the less grateful.”
“It is a pleasure to me to be able to do anything for you,” he said, gravely, somewhat stiffly—from his tone you would not have suspected much more truth than usual in the formula.