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    She made a good teacher, good because she understood all those lumpy children in so far as any but God could understand them, I guess, and held them all to her with a kind of hard leniency and discipline. She succeeded because she really cared about them and thought it important that they should know the states and the laws and the years in which things happened or died, although not caring if she forgot it all forever, herself. She believed that for some reason it was important and valuable for them to know 1066 and the mystery of square root, and never asked herself exactly why and so was able to teach them well and thoroughly. There’s a driving force—an energy lying in blindness—which is never known by those wondering and open-minded ones who are led bythought into doubt, and from there through all the stages of futility and despair until they are paralyzed to point out one way or the other even to children who haven’t the sense to sneer. But Kerrin, who riddled all laws herself, took a fanatic delight in shoving down law and order into their placid throats, amiably open wide and gaping. The children loved her, and sometimes she brought them home after school, one or two at a time, for no reason except that they asked her to. If they were little boys that came, Father would stop his work and come up to talk with them in an eager, hearty way, pointing out the pig houses or the water-pump by the pond, and laugh at whatever they said, no matter whether their words were smart or foolish. Kerrin herself liked the boys better because their faces were not so stupid and their minds clicked faster.The girls were already vacant wives, she said,—not stolid, their tongues slapping around like wheels, but already bounded tight with convention, a thick wall between them and the unknown things; nor was it in Kerrin to see and point out a way, or break a hole that these children could nose through and escape. “—Hillbillies and tenant farmers,” shesaid. “No Lincoln’ll ever come out of these. Smart enough to be even school-teachers, maybe, repeating the things they’ve read. Why should I try for more? They only want to know enough so they can clerk in a store some place and ride in a Ford on Sundays. Want to be able to read the magazines and catalogues. If they’re looking for more, they can go some place else and get it!—And none of them ever will. . . .”
    It was true and it wasn’t true—what she said about the children. People weren’t born and fastened to earth any more. They came and went, returning and leaving, not like a tide but in scattered ways and times. People came back to the land as we had come, after years of another life, bringing with them a newness to old things, a different seeing from the sight of men born with the sound of calves’ bawling in their ears and the taste of mud in their mouths from the beginning. There was no solitude utterly unpierced, no isolation complete any longer—except for the final one of self. If Kerrin had chosen to point out the myriad facets of life, the strangeness of breath itself, she might not have left them so blind and narrow, even if they had been as indifferent as she thought. But maybe sheherself didn’t see these things, and was blind and gaping, too, which made her restless and full of uncertain angry moods, and above all lonely.
    I hoped that this year she would find enough work to keep her quiet, and wished that August with schools beginning was not so far, although God knows we needed her help enough. She had been of more use to Father than even she herself realized, and things had taken him twice as long while she was away at school. He was slow and fumbled the harness, jerked and thumped at the horses until they pounded the walls. Kerrin used to do it all for him, shoving the bits in swift and angry, but with no hesitation or fumbling tries. A sort of contemptuous certainty. She used