Chapter 14 - Page 2

came into this room, where there were
blue vases for them, not a book was to be seen without a blue alpaca
cover. Here Miss Ailie received visitors in her white with the blue
braid, and enrolled new pupils in blue ink with a white pen. Some
laughed at her, others remembered that she must have something to love
after Miss Kitty died.

Miss Ailie had her romance, as you may hear by and by, but you would not
have thought it as she came forward to meet you in the blue-and-white
room, trembling lest your feet had brought in mud, but too much a lady
to ask you to stand on a newspaper, as she would have liked dearly to
do. She was somewhat beyond middle-age, and stoutly, even squarely,
built, which gave her a masculine appearance; but she had grown so timid
since Miss Kitty's death that when she spoke you felt that either her
figure or her manner must have been intended for someone else. In
conversation she had a way of ending a sentence in the middle which gave
her a reputation of being "thro'ither," though an artificial tooth was
the cause. It was slightly loose, and had she not at times shut her
mouth suddenly, and then done something with her tongue, an accident
might have happened. This tooth fascinated Tommy, and once when she was
talking he cried, excitedly, "Quick, it's coming!" whereupon her mouth
snapped close, and she turned pink in the blue-and-white room.

Nevertheless Tommy became her favorite, and as he had taught himself to
read, after a fashion, in London, where his lesson-books were chiefly
placards and the journal subscribed to by Shovel's father, she often
invited him after school hours to the blue-and-white room, where he sat
on a kitchen chair (with his boots off) and read aloud, very slowly,
while Miss Ailie knitted. The volume was from the Thrums Book Club, of
which Miss Ailie was one of the twelve members. Each member contributed
a book every year, and as their tastes in literature differed, all sorts
of books came into the club, and there was one member who invariably
gave a ro-ro-romance. He was double-chinned and forty, but the
school-mistress called him the dashing young banker, and for months she
avoided his dangerous contribution. But always there came a black day
when a desire to read the novel seized her, and she hurried home with it
beneath her rokelay. This year the dashing banker's choice was a lady's
novel called "I Love My Love with an A," and it was a frivolous tale,
those being before the days of the new fiction, with its grand discovery
that women have an equal right with men to grow beards. The hero had
such a way with him and was so young (Miss Ailie could not stand them a
day more than twenty) that the school-mistress was enraptured and scared