Eris learned little in school. There is little to learn in American schools. No nation is more illiterate. And in the sort of school she went to the ignorant are taught by the half educated. None of her teachers could speak English as it should be spoken. In their limited vocabulary there was no room for choice of words. Perhaps that was why negatives were doubled now and then. As for the rest, she was stuffed with falsified history and unessential geographical items; she was taught to read after a fashion, and to spell, and to juggle figures. There was a nature class, too, full of misinformation. And once an owlish, elderly man lectured on physiology; and told them in a low and solemn voice that “there is two sects in the phenonemy of natur, and little boys are made diffrunt to little girls.” That ended the lecture, leaving every little boy and little girl mad with unsatisfied curiosity, and some of the older children slightly uncomfortable. But The Great American Ass dominates this splendid land of ours. He _knows_. He’ll tell the world. And that’s that--as Odell was accustomed to say. And early in her career little Eris caught the cant phrase of finality from her father, and incorporated it with her increasing lingual equipment. When one of the boys tried to kiss her, she kicked his shins. “And that’s _that_!” she added breathlessly, smoothing out her rumpled pinafore. * * * * * In Mazie she had a stepmother who made no difference between Eris and her own progeny. She kissed them all alike at bedtime; dosed them when necessary, comforted their sorrows with stock reassurances from a limited vocabulary, darned, sewed, mended, washed for all alike. Mazie gave her children and her husband all she had time to give--all she had the capacity to give--the kindly, cheerful offices and understanding of a healthy female. Whitewater Queen was as good a mother. Both lacked imagination. But Whitewater Queen didn’t need any. For a time, however, the knowledge imbibed at school nourished Eris, although there were few vitamines in the feed. When she was thirteen her brothers--twelve, eleven, ten and nine--alternately bullied her, deferred to her, or ran bawling to her with their troubles. When she was fourteen the world met its own weird at Armageddon. The old order of things began to change. A new earth and a newly interpreted Heaven replaced the “former things” which had “passed away.” At eighteen Eris looked out over the smoking débris of “former things”--gazed out of limpid grey eyes upon “a new Heaven and a new Earth”; and saw the cloudy, gigantic spectre of all-that-had-once-been receding, dissolving, vanishing from the world where it had reigned so tyrannically and so long. * * * * *