She had had a better education in the Rockminster school than was required,
but if a good-natured schoolteacher hadn't coached her on special points in
pedagogy, school management, nature-study, etc., she would never have
passed the necessary examinations.

In an impersonal way she described the life of a teacher in a great
American school system: its routine, its spying supervision, its
injustices, its mechanical ideals, its one preeminent ambition to teach as
many years as it was necessary to obtain a pension. There were the
superintendents, the supervisors, the special teachers, the
principals--petty officers of a petty tyranny in which too often seethed
gossip, scandal, intrigue. There were the "soft places"; the deceitful, the
easy, the harsh principals; the teachers' institutes to which the poor
teacher was forced to pay her scanty dollars. There were bulletins, rules,
counter-rules. As she talked, Sommers caught the atmosphere of the great
engine to which she had given herself. A mere isolated atom, she was set in
some obscure corner of this intricate machine, and she was compelled to
revolve with the rest, as the rest, in the fear of disgrace and of hunger.
The terms "special teachers," "grades of pay," "constructive work,"
"discipline," etc., had no special significance to him, typifying merely
the exactions of the mill, the limitations set about the human atom.

Her manner of telling it all was unpremeditated, incoherent, and
discursive, and yet strangely effective. She described the contortions of
her kaleidoscope as they came to mind haphazard, with an indifference, a
precise objectivity that made the picture all the more real and universal,
not the special story of the special case.

"The first weeks I was nearly lost; the drawing teacher didn't like me, and
reported my room for disorder; the 'cat'--that is what they call the