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her, just as quick and strong, capricious, jubilant in attack.
    A mistake she made early and would not have made later on was in telling Flo the truth instead of some lie when a big boy, one of the Morey boys, tripped and grabbed her as she was coming down the fire escape, tearing the sleeve of her raincoat out at the armhole. Flo came to the school to raise Cain (her stated intention) and heard witnesses swear Rose had torn it on a nail. The teacher was glum, would not declare herself, indicated Flo’s visit was not welcome. Adults did not come to the school, in West Hanratty. Mothers were strongly partisan in fights, would hang over their gates, and yell; some would even rush out to tug hair and flail shingles, themselves. They would abuse the teacher behind her back and send their children off to school with instructions not to take any lip from her. But they would never have behaved as Flo did, never have set foot on school property, never have carried a complaint to that level. They would never have believed, as Flo seemed to believe (and here Rose saw her for the first time out of her depth, mistaken) that offenders would confess, or be handed over, that justice would take any form but a ripping and tearing of a Morey coat, in revenge, a secret mutilation in the cloakroom.
    Flo said the teacher did not know her business.
    But she did. She knew it very well. She locked the door at recess and let whatever was going to happen outside happen. She never tried to make the big boys come up from the basement or in from the fire escape. She made them chop kindling for the stove and fill the drinking pail; otherwise they were at liberty. They didn’t mind the wood-chopping or pumping, though they liked to douse people with freezing water, and came near murder with the axe. They were just at school because there was no place else for them to be. They were old enough for work but there were no jobs for them. Older girls could get jobs, as maids at least; so they did not stay in school, unless they were planning to write the Entrance, go to high school, maybe someday get jobs in stores or banks. Some of them would do that. From places like West Hanratty girls move up more easily than boys.
    The teacher had the big girls, excepting those in the Entrance Class, kept busy bossing the younger children, petting and slapping them, correcting spelling, and removing for their own use anything interesting in the way of pencil boxes, new crayons, Cracker Jack jewelry.What went on in the cloakroom, what lunchpail-robbing or coat-slashing or pulling down pants there was, the teacher did not consider her affair.
    She was not in any way enthusiastic, imaginative, sympathetic. She walked over the bridge every day from Hanratty, where she had a sick husband. She had come back to teaching in middle age. Probably this was the only job she could get. She had to keep at it, so she kept at it. She never put cutouts up on the windows or pasted gold stars in the workbooks. She never did drawings on the board with colored chalk. She had no gold stars, there was no colored chalk. She showed no love of anything she taught, or anybody. She must have wished, if she wished for anything, to be told one day she could go home, never see any of them, never open a spelling book, again.
    But she did teach things. She must have taught something to the people who were going to write the Entrance, because some of them passed it. She must have made a stab at teaching everybody who came into that school to read and write and do simple arithmetic. The stair railings were knocked out, desks were wrenched loose from the floor, the stove smoked and the pipes were held together with wire, there were no library books or maps, and never enough chalk; even the yardstick was dirty and splintered at one end. Fights and sex and pilferage were the important things going on. Nevertheless. Facts and tables were presented. In the face of all that disruption, discomfort, impossibility,