Just as soon as I get my bearings a little, and know exactly what we
need, I am going to accomplish some widespread discharging. I should
like to begin with Miss Snaith; but I discover that she is the niece
of one of our most generous trustees, and isn't exactly dischargeable.
She's a vague, chinless, pale-eyed creature, who talks through her nose
and breathes through her mouth. She can't say anything decisively and
then stop; her sentences all trail off into incoherent murmurings. Every
time I see the woman I feel an almost uncontrollable desire to take her
by the shoulders and shake some decision into her. And Miss Snaith is
the one who has had entire supervision of the seventeen little tots aged
from two to five! But, anyway, even if I can't discharge her, I have
reduced her to a subordinate position without her being aware of the
fact.
The doctor has found for me a charming girl who lives a few miles from
here and comes in every day to manage the kindergarten. She has big,
gentle, brown eyes, like a cow's, and motherly manners (she is just
nineteen), and the babies love her.
At the head of the nursery I have placed a jolly, comfortable
middle-aged woman who has reared five of her own and has a hand with
bairns. Our doctor also found her. You see, he is useful. She is
technically under Miss Snaith, but is usurping dictatorship in a
satisfactory fashion. I can now sleep at night without being afraid that
my babies are being inefficiently murdered.
You see, our reforms are getting started; and while I acquiesce with
all the intelligence at my command to our doctor's basic scientific
upheavals, still, they sometimes leave me cold. The problem that keeps
churning and churning in my mind is: How can I ever instil enough love
and warmth and sunshine into those bleak little lives? And I am not sure
that the doctor's science will accomplish that.
One of our most pressing INTELLIGENT needs just now is to get our
records into coherent form. The books have been most outrageously
unkept. Mrs. Lippett had a big black account book into which she jumbled
any facts that happened to drift her way as to the children's family,
their conduct, and their health. But for weeks at a time she didn't
trouble to make an entry. If any adopting family wants to know a child's
parentage, half the time we can't even tell where we got the child!
"Where did you come from, baby dear?"
"The blue sky opened, and I am here,"
is an exact description of their arrival.
We need a field worker to travel about the country and pick up all
the hereditary statistics she can about our chicks. It will be an easy
matter, as most of them have relatives. What do you think of Janet Ware
for the job? You remember what a shark she was in economics; she simply
battened on tables and charts and surveys.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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