in a library you begin just at noon to wish devoutly that
you'd taken up scrubbing-by-the-day, or hack-driving, or porch-climbing
or--anything on earth that gave you a weekly half-holiday!

So the Liberry Teacher braced herself severely, and put on her
reading-glasses with a view to looking older and more firm. "Liberry
Teacher," it might be well to explain, was not her official title. Her
description on the pay-roll ran "Assistant for the Children's
Department, Greenway Branch, City Public Library." Grown-up people, when
she happened to run across them, called her Miss Braithwaite. But
"Liberry Teacher" was the only name the children ever used, and she saw
scarcely anybody but the children, six days a week, fifty-one weeks a
year. As for her real name, that nobody ever called her by, _that_ was
Phyllis Narcissa.

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 stickil