"Dr. Dennis, there are at least seven of those twenty teachers in my room who ought to be in good, solid, earnest working Bible classes, getting faith for help every Sunday; getting ideas that shall make them of use in the world, instead of frittering their time away on what at best, seems to them but a very mechanical work, teaching some little children to repeat the Twenty-third Psalm, or to say the Lord's Prayer. The very fact that they do not recognize the dignity of such work unfits them for it; and the fact that they have no lesson to teach, I mean no lesson which they have to prepare carefully, excuses them from any attempt at Bible study." "I believe you would make an excellent lecturer, if you were to take the field on a subject that interested you." This was Dr. Dennis' most irrelevant answer to Marion's eager words. She was not to be thrown off her theme. "Then I shall try it, perhaps, on this very subject, for it certainly interests me wonderfully. Indeed, I am practicing now, with you for my audience." "Don't think I am not interested, for I am," he said, returning to gravity and anxiety on the instant. "I see the subject to be full of perplexities; the class has seemed a bewildering one; the idea of putting the babies away alone in their own room fitted up for the purpose, and feeding them with milk until they are old enough to bear strong meat, has been something of a hobby with me. I like it theoretically, but I confess to you that I have never been able to enjoy its practical workings in our school." "I don't wonder," Marion said, with energy. "It works most distressingly. I am coming to the very pith of my lecture now, which is this: I have been teaching school for more than seven years. I have taught all sorts and sizes of pupils. I had a fancy that I could manage almost anything in that line, believing that I had been through experiences varied enough to serve me in whatever line I could need, but I have found myself mistaken; I have found a work now that I can't accomplish. Mind you, I don't say that no one can do it; I am not quite so egotistic as that. If I do lecture, I have only to say that my teaching in that room is a failure, I can't do it, and I mean to give it up." "Don't," Dr. Dennis said, nervously. "You will be the third one in a year's time." "I don't wonder. I wonder that they are alive." "But, Miss Wilbur, you are a dark and gloomy lecturer. When you demolish air castles, have you nothing to build up in their places? Would you send the babies back into the main room again, to be worn out with quiet and lack of motion?" "Not a bit of it. I like the baby-room plan as well as any mortal; and I have a remedy which it seems to me would arrange the whole thing. Of course it seems so to me; we always like our own ways. The truth is, Dr. Dennis, I like nurseries, and think they ought to be maintained; but I don't like the idea of too many mothers there."