Lena and Mary Evelyn had a glamorous life in Primary that set them far above Marcia. They had to learn pieces to speak on Exercise Day once a month. Since Mary Evelyn’s mother worked in the Fair Store, both children learned in the Willard sitting room, while Marcia, burning with jealousy, played by herself in a corner, cutting out lady paper dolls all with two names. Marcia couldn’t go to school till next term, although she had read and written almost as soon as she walked and talked. This, like her memory, was a dubious talent, for it was not healthy to be different from other children. It wasn’t healthy to learn Lena’s and Mary Evelyn’s pieces the second time she heard them laboriously spelled out, and it was certainly not tactful. Her mother, with a little schoolgirl on each knee, looked down at Marcia helplessly.

“Marcia, you’re supposed to be playing paper dolls!” she protested. “If the girls haven’t begun to know their pieces by this time, there’s no reason why you should.”

“She isn’t even six,” Lena Gladys said coldly to her personal friend, Mary Evelyn. “Now, I’ll begin mine again. ‘The gingerbread dog and the calico cat—’ ”

“ ‘Side by side on the table sat,’ ” Marcia shrieked, and ran out into the yard yelling the rest of the piece until her mother caught her and boxed her ears.

This correction, not being understood, was forgotten on Exercise Day the next month, when Lena (and of course Marcia) had learned “Little Orphan Annie” with gestures. Mama left Florrie at Grandma’s and took Marcia to visit the First Grade. It was an exciting day with the rustle of mothers’ best silks, the smell of chalk dust and newly scrubbed halls, and the squirming of the children sitting two at a desk to make room for the Second Graders. Marcia and her mother sat with the visiting mothers and smaller children in folding chairs on one side of the room. The teacher had drawn a flag in colors on the blackboard, and there were pussy willows and autumn leaves on her desk. She tapped a little silver gong on her desk when everyone was seated, and she said, “Before we begin the Exercises, perhaps some of our little visitors have a piece they would like to recite for us.” Without further urging, Marcia slid off her mother’s lap and marched over to the platform, where she recited at terrific speed with glib gestures “Little Orphan Annie.” The performance was marked by her mother’s horrified face and the sound of Lena sobbing softly into her Reader, “That’s my piece! Now I haven’t got any piece!”

Even after a punishment for this breach of etiquette and her stout defense, “But Lena didn’t know it anyway!” Marcia continued to steal Lena’s arithmetic or reader and run easily through the homework while Lena was patiently working over one word in her Speller. Marcia could not understand why it took her sister or Mary Evelyn so long to learn things when they were like candy—you saw them, ate them, and that was the end. Nor could she understand why it was bad for her to find the books so simple, just because she wasn’t in school yet. It was confusing to be scolded for doing Lena’s lessons, and then overhear her father chuckling about it to Mr. Friend. These were all matters that would clear up certainly when she started going to school so there was no use puzzling about them.