Judge Milford’s pedagogical scheme was to let
the children read whatever they pleased, and in his
brown library Carol absorbed Balzac and Rabelais and
Thoreau and Max Muller. He gravely taught them
the letters on the backs of the encyclopedias, and
when polite visitors asked about the mental progress
of the “little ones,” they were horrified
to hear the children earnestly repeating A-And, And-Aus,
Aus-Bis, Bis-Cal, Cal-Cha.
Carol’s mother died when she was nine.
Her father retired from the judiciary when she was
eleven, and took the family to Minneapolis. There
he died, two years after. Her sister, a busy proper
advisory soul, older than herself, had become a stranger
to her even when they lived in the same house.
From those early brown and silver days and from her
independence of relatives Carol retained a willingness
to be different from brisk efficient book-ignoring
people; an instinct to observe and wonder at their
bustle even when she was taking part in it. But,
she felt approvingly, as she discovered her career
of town-planning, she was now roused to being brisk
and efficient herself.
In a month Carol’s ambition had clouded.
Her hesitancy about becoming a teacher had returned.
She was not, she worried, strong enough to endure
the routine, and she could not picture herself standing
before grinning children and pretending to be wise
and decisive. But the desire for the creation
of a beautiful town remained. When she encountered
an item about small-town women’s clubs or a
photograph of a straggling Main Street, she was homesick
for it, she felt robbed of her work.
It was the advice of the professor of English which
led her to study professional library-work in a Chicago
school. Her imagination carved and colored the
new plan. She saw herself persuading children
to read charming fairy tales, helping young men to
find books on mechanics, being ever so courteous to
old men who were hunting for newspapers—the
light of the library, an authority on books, invited
to dinners with poets and explorers, reading a paper
to an association of distinguished scholars.
The last faculty reception before commencement.
In five days they would be in the cyclone of final
examinations.
The house of the president had been massed with palms
suggestive of polite undertaking parlors, and in the
library, a ten-foot room with a globe and the portraits
of Whittier and Martha Washington, the student orchestra
was playing “Carmen” and “Madame
Butterfly.” Carol was dizzy with music
and the emotions of parting. She saw the palms
as a jungle, the pink-shaded electric globes as an
opaline haze, and the eye-glassed faculty as Olympians.
She was melancholy at sight of the mousey girls with
whom she had “always intended to get acquainted,”
and the half dozen young men who were ready to fall
in love with her.
