The grown-ups painfully bent their knees under these narrow confines, some of them acting as though they were astonished that they were so much larger than they were in the old school days. Most of them hadn’t been in the school house since they had gone out with their tattered books in a strap so many years before.
“It makes ye feel nearer the grave, don’t it?” whispered Salome Burpee to her seat mate of the old days, who had by almost unconscious choice sought the well-remembered desk.
The seat mate, a tall, scrawny woman, was obliged to sit sidewise, for she couldn’t get her knees under the desk.
“My, yes!” she replied rather mournfully. “It don’t seem hardly a day ago that I could sit here and swing my feet.”
“That’s my initial,” mumbled Deacon Burgess to Uncle Paul Appleby, fingering a deep nick in the edge of the desk. “They was new then, and I got walloped for cutting it.”
The men had gravitated to one side of the room, the women to the other. All whispered decorously if they had occasion to address one another, for in rural communities the usual gatherings are prayer meetings, and habit is strong.
They discussed the report that the Squire had gone to the teacher’s boarding place with her, and would be present at the meeting that evening, and that he had talked “real saucy” to Mrs. Dunham, and that, too, after she had hired him for her lawyer.
Esther sat grimly at the far side of the room in the girls’ reservation, and Micajah was hunched into a seat on the other side, his eyes staring straight before him. Neither exchanged a word with any other person in the room.
“I heard it hinted,” whispered the scrawny woman, “that Sylvene Willard is going to stick her nose into this thing. She has allus made more or less of ’Lize Haskell, and ’Lize has been one of her ‘Grit and Grace Girls,’ as she calls ’em.” The woman’s tone was scornful. “You can let Sylvene Willard alone to put more tomfool notions into a girl’s head in a minit than practical common-sense will weed out in a year. She’s got them girls meetin’ to her house Saturdays and readin’ a lot of ratted stuff out loud and writin’ papers and foolin’ with a lot of lit’ry sculch. I wouldn’t let my Minnie join in with ’em. I told her that there was too much readin’ and writin’ of tomrot in the world now, and if she wanted to read she could stay to home and read cook-book receets. It may not be quite so new-fangled and fash’nable as it is to read about furrin’ countries”--the woman’s lips curled and her nostrils spread--“but it is a blamed sight more to the point if a woman’s goin’ to amount to anything in this world and has got a husband and fam’ly--as she ought to have.”