The Charm School
Indeed, exactly the same quality that had made him a good automobile salesman now made him a good school principal—that is, a profound and conscientious attention to detail. His former employers had sometimes thought he carried this tiresomely far, but, now that he was his own boss, he could carry it as far as he liked. It was this attention to detail that from the first made Miss Curtis worship him. She, too, was conscientious, so that she suffered intensely when things went wrong, but so unexecutive that she never knew how to get them right. Mrs. Bevans had been a little slack at times—had pretended that the roof really wasn't leaking and that the furnace-man wasn't drunk. But Austin was on the roof instantly, and had taken the furnace-man to the priest to sign the pledge almost before he was sober enough to know what he was doing.
Austin never confided to Miss Curtis how the furnace-man explained his bad habits, as the geranium-colored car bore him toward the priest's house. "It's this working for women gets me," he said. "It's always so polite they are, and yet always after you."
The first academic problem to present itself was the case of the course in Sacred
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