stance, at Grammar School, one no longer
speaks of boys in undertones. One assumes an attitude of having always
known boys. At Grammar School, classes attend chapel. There are boys in
Chapel, still separated from the girls, to be sure, after the manner of
the goats from the sheep; but after one learns to laugh from the corners
of one's eyes at boys, a dividing line of mere aisle is soon abridged.
Watching Rosalie, Emmy Lou discovered this.
There was a boy in Chapel whom she knew, but it takes courage to look
out of the corners of one's eyes, and Emmy Lou could only find
sufficient to look straight, which is altogether a different thing. But
the boy saw her. Emmy Lou looked away quickly.
Once the boy's name had been Billy; later, at dancing school, it was
Willie; now, the Principal who conducted Chapel Exercises called him
William.
Emmy Lou liked this Principal. He had white hair, and when it fell into
his eyes he would stand it wildly over his head, running his fingers
through its thickness; but one did not laugh because of greater interest
in what he said.
Emmy Lou asked Rosalie the Principal's name, but Rosalie was smiling
backward at a boy as the classes filed out of Chapel. Afterward she
explained that his name was Mr. Page.
At Grammar School Emmy Lou continued to learn things. The pupils of a
grammar school abjure school bags; a Geography now being a folio volume
measurable in square feet, it is the thing to build upon its basic
foundation an edifice of other text-books, and carry the sum total to
and fro on an aching arm.
Nor do grammar-school pupils bring lunch; they bring money, and buy
lunch--pies, or doughnuts, or pickles--having done with the infant
pabulum of primary bread and butter.
Nor does so big a girl as a grammar-school pupil longer confess to any
infantile abbreviation of entitlement; she gives her full baptismal name
and is written down, as in Emmy Lou's case, Emily Louise Pope MacLauren,
which has its drawbacks; for she sometimes fails to recognise the
unaccustomed sound of that name when called unexpectedly from the
platform.
For at twelve years, an Emmy Lou finds herself dreaming, and watching
the clouds through the school-room windows. The reading lesson concerns
one Alnaschar, the Barber's Fifth Brother; and while the verses go
droningly round, the kalsomined blue walls fade, and one wanders the
market-place of Bagdad, amid bales of rich stuffs, and trays of golden
trinkets a
|