“Wish I’d never said I’d do that piece on the schools for Jem.”

Nick poured out two cups of coffee and added milk to his. Ellen drank hers black. “Makes me nervous,” she always said, but she meant that feeling nervous was what she wanted, like a thoroughbred horse.

“Seems like I haven’t the energy to go up in the attic and dig around—there must be letters, old spellers. After all, your granddad taught for ten years here in Willard long before I did. And Miss Morse—they were talking about her at the meeting. Don’t suppose her niece has anything, but she might.”

Nick laughed. “Dad threw the teacher out the window when he was a boy, and the teacher never showed his face again.” Like many mild sons of tyrant fathers, Nick enjoyed his father’s exploits, especially now that the threatening power had gone.

“He told you that, I suppose. Sometimes there was a grain of truth somewhere—they did have a brute of a man, made the boys stand on the stove to punish them, or whupped them with a strap. It may be your father had enough one day.”

Ellen drank down her coffee and picked up her needle, and there was silence again. But Nick, she knew, was not reading; he was thinking about his dad. Queer how he seemed to think well of him when Rufus had been such a hard father to the boy. She smiled, thinking of Rufus throwing a teacher out the window! The truth was that women had been better at keeping order in school than men—although neither “man” nor “woman” was the accurate word, since they were often younger than their oldest pupil. But a girl—Ellen knew from her own experience—could put the fear of God into a sharp, sassy lad, as she had done more than once herself, though her knees were shaking under her skirt. She thought about the schools as her needle flew in and out. It was high time someone talked about how harsh a world it had been: the fearful cold in winter, the way they boasted about the schooling, but she never could get money out of the selectmen for a new blackboard or chalk or new books, and even the firewood had to be extracted stick by stick.

“You’re all het up,” Nick observed.

“It doesn’t do to go that far back,” she said quietly, “except maybe to remember how much better things are now. We forget about the chilblains and the soggy mittens and the smell of unwashed children huddled together. It was all awfully poor, Nick. That’s what they forget—poor and hard.”