"But you're nearly old enough now," Miss Bailey encouraged her, "to do as you please, and you're getting on so nicely with your reading and writing that you will be able to get a very good position."
"Not 'til he's dead," the girl answered. "I guess you wouldn't learn me no more if you knew how often I wish he'd choke himself, or fall down cellar, or go out an' git run over. But he don't never go out. He says he's afraid something would happen to the store. But that's a pipe! What bothers him is the cash he's got tucked around in crazy places. Every once in a while I fall into some of it, and then he 'most has a fit explaining how it's change a customer is comin' back for. Last year it wasn't quite so bad. He went to night school one term. You would have died laughing to see him all folded up at a kid's desk tryin' to write in a copy book. They learned him to write three words that term, but when he found out that he couldn't read them in print, it sort of discouraged him, and he stayed home."
"It's awfully hard for you," Miss Bailey repeated, "but you mustn't let yourself say such things or think such things--about his getting killed, I mean--it's not"--she found herself on the verge of saying "Christian," but remembered that Gertie made no pretence to the Christian virtues--"not loving," she ended, and felt that the meaning of the two words was very much the same.
"Well, I don't love him," said Gertie shortly, "I hate him!"
"All right, I won't say it. I do it all the time."
"What's the capital of Massachusetts?" demanded Miss Bailey, changing the subject with a jerk.
"It's Grandpa's capital that's bothering me," laughed Gertie, but she allowed herself to be led away from the trials and problems of Goerck Street into the cool groves of learning.
A few mornings later Miss Blake, whose kingdom, Room 17, bordered upon Miss Bailey's territory, bustled into Room 18 with a fat and elaborate purse in her hand.
"You know that wicked little Hymie Abrahams who seems to be always getting into trouble," she began, when the First Readers had stiffened to straight "attention" and sat, each in his little place, like some extraordinary form of tin soldiers.
Miss Bailey nodded. She had indeed for many days been haunted by the fear that Hymie Abrahams would perpetrate some too flagrant breach of discipline, and be degraded to the First Reader class, and she naturally dreaded the advent of such a wolf among her little lambs.