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outside her door, and a misbehaving child could be sent out there for a scolding or the strap. She intercepted notes when they tried to pass them, and read them aloud, which soon put a stop to that. Whisperers were told to speak aloud and tell the whole class what they had to say.
    Now even the little ones sometimes grin openly at her, and she hears them giggling and whispering. She may no longer punish as she sees fit. She is told to be “creative” in her teaching, whatever that may mean. If they are interested, the principal has suggested, they will learn. He is much younger than she. Authority, she notices, has skipped past her: policemen she sees on the streets are just peach-cheeked babies, and the doctor, George Bannon, is only Frances’s age. Even the other teachers are young, arriving eager and staying a while and moving on, like the children passing out of her classes. She is the only one who seems to be permanent.
    Those other teachers behave like children, too, playing in the schoolyard, throwing baseballs around, running and shouting. There seems hardly any distance at all between them and the pupils. How do they keep order? Well, the answer of course is that they don’t. Standing in the hall, she can hear shouts and laughter from other classrooms.
    In the staff-room they talk about young things: buying clothes and houses and having babies. They lean toward each other over tables. She suspects that, when she comes in, they glance at her and feel sorry for her. Either that or they don’t notice her at all.
    June knows she is not one of the popular teachers. She knows quite well that, behind her back, pupils call her “old beaky-brain”, although it makes no sense to her and she has no idea what they mean by it. It’s another example of their incomprehensibility: sounds, she supposes, that appeal to them, but meaningless, nonsense sounds, intending but not specifying insult.
    It doesn’t matter what they call her, if she does her job and they learn what she has to teach. She supposes some of them will remember her, for her thoroughness if nothing else. Beyond that, it should be of no concern.
    There was a teacher, older than June, who was adored. She taught Grade 1, and little girls clung to her, competing for her attention and affection. They walked her home from school, jostling each other to be beside her, holding her hands. At recess, they showed off. “Look Miss Pearson, I can turn a somersault,” that sort of thing. When she retired, parents she had taught came with children she had taught to an enormous reception for her. The adults jostled each other to get close. And all Mabel Pearson ever did, as far as June could tell, was wear pretty dresses and smile a great deal, speak gently to her pupils, and allow her hands to be held by sweaty, sticky little palms.
    What will be done when June retires? Nothing like that outpouring of affection for Mabel Pearson, who, even now, at seventy, can walk beaming down the street being stopped by forty- and fifty-year-olds still keen for her approval.
    June can see herself at that stage, sailing along being greeted, if at all, with deference and perhaps a touch of fear. No one will clutch at her arm, which is just as well. She has often thought how unpleasant it must be for Mabel Pearson, being clutched at all the time.
    Respect, that’s something she learned from her father: the respect a teacher warrants. Certainly in his day that was recognized by other men, who, she saw, greeted him in the street with deference; even people like the banker tipped his hat to her father.
    The inexplicable thing is how her honorable, upright father could have brought himself to marry Aggie, even granting that she may have been attractive at the time. It seems to have been his only lapse in judgment. June does not believe at all the things her mother says about him. And even if they were true, she knows herself — who better? — how