Carmella Commands
lem had been in debate between them, “think of having a President of the United States who talked with a foreign twang, just because I didn’t make the teachers drill them in English, over and over.”
The superintendent had smiled, and Mr. Carroll’s methods were not questioned further. Occasionally the parents of Anglo-Saxon origin complained, but for political reasons their complaints never reached far, and now and then some such child was quietly transferred to another school, if the complaints were vigorous enough.
Carmella would have reveled in the English lessons of her schoolday, except that the bigger children in the rear seats kept the business of learning in too elementary a stage. She was forever asking Miss Kelly questions about words and sentences. But the other studies found her uninterested and careless.
Just now, in geography, they were studying South America. Carmella recited the highly important characteristics of Ecuador without enthusiasm. Mostly she had them wrong. She was more interested in arranging a pin so that it would stick into Salvatore, the boy in front, when he sat back, than in the whole vast problem of the future welfare of Ecuador.
But this morning, the day after the real estate negotiations in Greendale, Carmella suddenly turned herself with almost a ferocity of interest toward another study—arithmetic. Early in the forenoon she raised her hand, waving it madly until Miss Kelly responded.
[52]
