essed his emotions upon his
wife for she came down and talked elaborately about starting a cooking
school in the building, and after planning it all out, went away and
forgot it. The respectable iron gray side-whiskers of Ahab Wright once
relieved the dingy school room, when Ahab looked in and the next day
Kyle Perry on behalf of the firm of Wright & Perry came trudging into
the kindergarten with a huge box which he said contained a
p-p-p-p-p-pat-a-p-p-p-pppat-pat--here he swallowed and started all
over and finally said p-p-patent, and then started out on a long
struggle with the word swing, but he never finished it, and until Laura
opened the box she thought Mr. Perry had brought her a soda fountain.
But Nathan Perry, his son, who came wandering down to the place one
afternoon with Anne Sands, put up the swing, and suggested a half dozen
practical devices for the teacher to save time and labor in her work,
while Anne Sands in her teens looked on as one who observes a major god
completing a bungling job of the angels on a newly contrived world.

Sometimes coming home from his day's work Amos Adams would drop in for a
chat with the tired teacher, and he refreshed her curiously with his
quiet manner and his unsure otherworldliness, and his tough, unyielding
optimism. He had no lectures for the children. He would watch them at
their games, try to play with them himself in a pathetic, old-fashioned
way, telling them fairy stories of an elder and a grimmer day than ours.
Sometimes Doctor Nesbit, coming for Laura in his buggy, would find Amos
in the school room, and they would fall to their everlasting debate upon
the reality of time and space with the Doctor enjoying hugely his
impious attempt to couch the terminology of abstract philosophy in his
Indiana vernacular.

Lida Bowman bringing her little brood sometimes would sit silently
watching the children, and look at Laura as if about to speak, but she
always went away with her mind unrelieved. Violet Hogan, who brought her
beruffled and bedizened eldest, made up for Mrs. Bowman's reticence.
Moreover Violet brought other mothers and there was much talk on the
topics of the day--talk that revealed to Laura Nesbit a whole philosophy
that was new to her--the helpfulness of the poor to the poor.

But if others brought to Laura Van Dorn material strength and spiritual
comfort in her enterprise, Grant Adams waved the wand of his steel claw
over the kindergarten and made it live