She believed she hated the librarian at the public library to which Mr. Hinckly directed her. On her first day there the librarian had spoken harshly to Laurel, and made her blush with shame. Laurel had never used a card catalogue before. It hadn’t been necessary with Miss Thomas. In her engrossed interest in the myriads of varying titles she had drawn out and piled on the table beside her at least a dozen of the little drawers that contained the luring cards.

Suddenly somebody at her elbow exclaimed, “You musn’t do that!”

Laurel gave a startled little jump. She had been a thousand miles away.

“It’s not necessary to remove but one drawer at a time.” There was displeasure in the voice.

Laurel flushed.

The librarian began returning the drawers to their places with emphatic little jerk and shoves. Then, glancing at Laurel sharply, she remarked, “Why, you’ve picked them from A to Z! What book is it you’re hunting for, anyway?”

Laurel was forced to answer. “I wasn’t hunting for any special book.”

“What were you doing, then?”

“I was just looking at the titles for fun,” Laurel murmured.

The librarian gave her a withering look. “The card catalogue is not fun. It’s for use,” she reprimanded. “It’s not a toy. It’s a tool. Don’t ever play with it again.”

Once out on the street Laurel said to herself, fighting with tears she could not control, “I’ll never go near it again! I’ll never go into the building again!”

It was six months before her hunger for books overcame her fear of being recognized and humiliated a second time.

3

LAUREL SPENT MANY hours in the trolley-cars in Boston. Her mother decided it was too late in the year to attempt to place her in any private school (of course public schools were no more to be considered in Boston than in Milhampton), but Mr. Hinckly said Boston was full of splendid institutions that specialized in about every subject that existed, and he could arrange for Laurel to take up courses of instruction in almost any of them.

Therefore Laurel traveled from one side of Boston to another, pursuing music in one building, French and German in another, Art in a third, Current Events in a fourth, Filet lace-making in the top loft of a fifth. She chafed beneath the incoherent routine. She longed for Miss Fillibrown’s, although she hadn’t been very happy there. She thought it was the familiar classrooms and familiar faces she was homesick for, but really it was the coordination and consistency of an organized unit. The pupils in Laurel’s classes in Boston were as varied in age, race, sex, and station as are a chance group gathered together in the elevator of a public building.