“Yes, but that’s diff’runt. I always read about the people, and the animals, and what’s in the country, and what the inhabitants do, and how they live. But at school they make you tell all the mountain ranges from the northeast to the southwest of Asia, and the names are awful hard to learn. They’re just like eight times seven, and seven times nine: there doesn’t seem to be anything to make you remember them, but there’s a whole lot of things to make you forget them!”
“Wait until you get into fractions,” said Gassy. “_Then_ you’ll see! ’Rithmetic is just planned to keep you guessing. When I was beginning addition, I thought that was all there was to learn, but afterwards I found that I’d only learned it so I could do subtraction. Everything you find out about just makes more things for you to study. I wish I’d stayed with my mind a blank,—like the Everett baby.”
“Don’t worry about that,” said Jack, consolingly. “You haven’t strayed so far from that condition that you can’t find your way back.”
There was a crackle of stiff white apron, a flash of thin, black legs, and Whiting’s Language Lessons went sailing through the air, its pages falling as it struck Jack’s head.
“Now see what you’ve done, Spitfire!” said Jack.
Two months before, this exhibition of temper would have been made the subject of a moral lecture from Barbara. Now she only looked sober as she bent to help Gassy pick up the leaves. “Poor book,” she said; “you’ve given it what Jack deserved. That’s hardly fair, is it? Come, Boy, help repair the damage that you caused. No, David, you needn’t help; I want you to go and get ready for school.”
The little boy raised himself from the couch with a long-drawn sigh that Barbara remembered days afterward. “All right, if you say so,” he said: “I’ll change my waist now.”
The house seemed very still after the children had trooped out to swell the procession of young people headed toward the school. Barbara reflected with relief that their departure would lighten her labors. With the Kid at kindergarten, and the others away from home, she could count on a tidy house and an unbroken opportunity for work.
“It doesn’t seem very affectionate to be glad that they are gone,” she said to herself. “Mother always seemed to be sorry when our vacation was over. But it _is_ a relief to have a quiet house, and a chance to work without a dozen interruptions an hour. Perhaps, after I get things into running order, I shall have time to do a little writing every morning while they are out of the way. Then—”