n't wonder," Marion said, with energy. "It works most
distressingly. I am coming to the very pith of my lecture now, which is
this: I have been teaching school for more than seven years. I have
taught all sorts and sizes of pupils. I had a fancy that I could manage
almost anything in that line, believing that I had been through
experiences varied enough to serve me in whatever line I could need, but
I have found myself mistaken; I have found a work now that I can't
accomplish. Mind you, I don't say that no one can do it; I am not quite
so egotistic as that. If I do lecture, I have only to say that my
teaching in that room is a failure, I can't do it, and I mean to give it
up."

"Don't," Dr. Dennis said, nervously. "You will be the third one in a
year's time."

"I don't wonder. I wonder that they are alive."

"But, Miss Wilbur, you are a dark and gloomy lecturer. When you demolish
air castles, have you nothing to build up in their places? Would you
send the babies back into the main room again, to be worn out with quiet
and lack of motion?"

"Not a bit of it. I like the baby-room plan as well as any mortal; and I
have a remedy which it seems to me would arrange the whole thing. Of
course it seems so to me; we always like our own ways. The truth is, Dr.
Dennis, I like nurseries, and think they ought to be maintained; but I
don't like the idea of too many mothers there."

"Just what, in plain English, would you do, my friend, if you were
commander-in-chief of the whole matter, and all we had to do was to obey
you?"

"It isn't at all modest to tell," Marion said, laughing, "but it is
true. I would banish every one of those twenty teachers, and reign alone
in my glory. No I wouldn't either. I would pick out the very best one
among them, and train her for an assistant."

"And manage the whole number yourself!"

"Why not? There are only a hundred of them, and I have managed that
number for six hours a day, five days in a week, without difficulty."

"Well, now, let me see just what you think you gain."

"It would take too long to tell. In my own opinion, I gain almost
everything. But, in the first place, let me suppose a case. We have one
good teacher, we will say, in that class, who knows just what she is
about, and comes prepared to be about it. She has, say, two assistants,
each carefully trained to a certain work; each understanding that in the
event of the detention of the leader one of them will be called on t