FOR a long time school had been throwing a shadow over Alice's life. It had all been decided for months that Robert was to go to public school in the fall. He was two years late going, but a very superior kindergarten "took" children through the first grade. In his second year influenza had raged, and so William Travers Jenkins, and Phyllis Alden, and Robert had had school together. Robert was therefore ready for the fourth grade and swaggered a good deal about it. That is to say, he was more than ready in geography and arithmetic, but his writing was scandalous, and his interest in life had never allowed him time to learn to spell.
Tom took Robert's going to school with complacency. Public school, he had decided, was the best thing after all, since it fitted boys for life. But Alice looked upon the handsome brick school building as she might look upon a pest-house that soon was to engulf her child. She often had to pass it on her way to the grocery. It had large plate windows which from the sidewalk looked as green as the windows in front of an aquarium, and perpetually fluttering and swinging behind them were the raised hands of children. One could only see their hands tossed restlessly upwards through the green glass.
This school building seemed to her full of enemies. She dreaded the school with the same intensity that she feared second summers, weaning, and the whooping cough. Once your children went to school, then, indeed, they set sail for the unknown. Kindergarten wasn't so
