She was quite willing to have such a name as that buried out of sight.
She had a sense of fitness; and such a name belonged back in an old New
England parsonage garden full of pink roses and nice green caterpillars
and girl-dreams, and the days before she was eighteen: not in a smutty
city library, attached to a twenty-five-year-old young woman with
reading-glasses and fine discipline and a woolen shirt-waist!
It wasn't that the Liberry Teacher didn't like her position. She not
only liked it, but she had a great deal of admiration for it, because it
had been exceedingly hard to get. She had held it firmly now for a whole
year. Before that she had been in the Cataloguing, where your eyes hurt
and you get a little pain between your shoulders, but you sit down and
can talk to other girls; and before that in the Circulation, where it
hurts your feet and you get ink on your fingers, but you see lots of
funny things happening. She had started at eighteen years old, at thirty
dollars a month. Now she was twenty-five, and she got all of fifty
dollars, so she ought to have been a very happy Liberry Teacher indeed,
and generally she was. When the children wanted to specify her
particularly they described her as "the pretty one that laughs." But at
four o'clock of a wet Saturday afternoon, in a badly ventilated, badly
lighted room full of damp little unwashed foreign children, even the
most sunny-hearted Liberry Teacher may be excused for having thoughts
that are a little tired and cross and restless.
She flung herself back in her desk-chair and watched, with brazen
indifference, Giovanni and Liberata Bruno stickily pawing the colored
Bird Book that was supposed to be looked at only under supervision; she
ignored the fact that three little Czechs were fighting over the wailing
library cat; and the sounds of conflict caused by Jimsy Hoolan's desire
to get the last-surviving Alger book away from John Zanowski moved her
not a whit. The Liberry Teacher had stopped, for five minutes, being
grown-up and responsible, and she was wishing--wishing hard and
vengefully. This is always a risky thing to do, because you never know
when the Destinies may overhear you and take you at your exact word.
With the detailed and careful accuracy one acquires in library work, she
was wishing for a sum of money, a garden, and a husband--but
principally a husband. This is why:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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