LITMIR.BIZ

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Pringles are a kind of clan who keeps tabs on each other and fight a good bit among themselves but stand shoulder to shoulder in regard to any outsider. I have come to the conclusion that there are just two kinds of people in Summerside … those who are Pringles and those who aren’t.

      “My room is full of Pringles and a good many students who bear another name have Pringle blood in them. The ring-leader of them seems to be Jen Pringle, a green-eyed bantling who looks as Becky Sharp must have looked at fourteen. I believe she is deliberately organizing a subtle campaign of insubordination and disrespect, with which I am going to find it hard to cope. She has a knack of making irresistibly comic faces and when I hear a smothered ripple of laughter running over the room behind my back I know perfectly well what has caused it, but so far I haven’t been able to catch her out in it. She has brains, too … the little wretch! … can write compositions that are fourth cousins to literature and is quite brilliant in mathematics … woe is me! There is a certain sparkle in everything she says or does and she has a sense of humorous situations which would be a bond of kinship between us if she hadn’t started out by hating me. As it is, I fear it will be a long time before Jen and I can laugh together over anything.

      “Myra Pringle, Jen’s cousin, is the beauty of the school … and apparently stupid. She does perpetrate some amusing howlers … as, for instance, when she said today in history class that the Indians thought Champlain and his men were gods or ‘something inhuman.’

      “Socially the Pringles are what Rebecca Dew calls ‘the e-light’ of Summerside. Already I have been invited to two Pringle homes for supper … because it is the proper thing to invite a new teacher to supper and the Pringles are not going to omit the required gestures. Last night I was at James Pringle’s … the father of the aforesaid Jen. He looks like a college professor but is in reality stupid and ignorant. He talked a great deal about ‘discipline,’ tapping the tablecloth with a finger the nail of which was not impeccable and occasionally doing dreadful things to grammar. The Summerside High had always required a firm hand … an experienced teacher, male preferred. He was afraid I was a leetle too young … ‘a fault which time will cure all too soon,’ he said sorrowfully. I didn’t say anything because if I had said anything I might have said too much. So I was as smooth and creamy as any Pringle of them all could have been and contented myself with looking limpidly at him and saying inside of myself, ‘You cantankerous, prejudiced old creature!’

      “Jen must have got her brains from her mother … whom I found myself liking. Jen, in her parents’ presence, was a model of decorum. But though her words were polite her tone was insolent. Every time she said ‘Miss Shirley’ she contrived to make it sound like an insult. And every time she looked at my hair I felt that it was just plain carroty red. No Pringle, I am certain, would ever admit it was auburn.

      “I liked the Morton Pringles much better … though Morton Pringle never really listens to anything you say. He says something to you and then, while you’re replying, he is busy thinking out his next remark.

      “Mrs. Stephen Pringle … the Widow Pringle … Summerside abounds in widows … wrote me a letter yesterday … a nice, polite, poisonous letter. Millie has too much home work … Millie is a delicate child and must not be overworked. Mr. Bell never gave her home work. She is a sensitive child that must be understood. Mr. Bell understood her so well! Mrs. Stephen is sure I will, too, if I try!

      “I do not doubt Mrs. Stephen thinks I made Adam Pringle’s nose bleed in class today by reason of which he had to go home. And I woke up last night and couldn’t go to sleep again because I remembered an i I hadn’t dotted in a question I wrote on the board. I’m certain Jen Pringle would notice it and a whisper will go around the clan about it.

      “Rebecca Dew says that all the Pringles will invite me to supper, except the old ladies at Maplehurst, and then ignore me forever afterwards. As they are the ‘e-light,’ this may mean that socially I may be banned in Summerside. Well, we’ll see. The battle is on but is not yet either won or lost. Still, I feel rather unhappy over it all. You can’t reason with prejudice. I’m still just as I used to be in my childhood … I can’t bear to have people not liking me. It isn’t pleasant to think that the families of half my pupils hate me. And for no fault of my own. It is the injustice that stings me. There go more italics! But a few italics really do relieve your feelings.

      “Apart from the Pringles I like my pupils very much. There are some clever, ambitious, hardworking ones who are really interested in getting an education. Lewis Allen is paying for his board by doing housework at his boardinghouse and isn’t a bit ashamed of it. And Sophy Sinclair rides bareback on her father’s old gray mare six miles in and six miles out every day. There’s pluck for you! If I can help a girl like that, am I to mind the Pringles?

      “The trouble is … if I can’t win the Pringles I won’t have much chance of helping anybody.

      “But I love Windy Poplars. It isn’t a boardinghouse … it’s a home! And they like me … even Dusty Miller likes me, though he sometimes disapproves of me and shows it by deliberately sitting with his back turned towards me, occasionally cocking a golden eye over his shoulder at me to see how I’m taking it. I don’t pet him much when Rebecca Dew is around because it really does irritate her. By day he is a homely, comfortable, meditative animal … but he is decidedly a weird creature at night. Rebecca says it is because he is never allowed to stay out after dark. She hates to stand in the back yard and call him. She says the neighbors will all be laughing at her. She calls in such fierce, stentorian tones that she really can be heard all over the town on a still night shouting for ‘Puss … puss … PUSS!’ The widows would have a conniption if Dusty Miller wasn’t in when they went to bed. ‘Nobody knows what I’ve gone through on account of That Cat… nobody,’ Rebecca has assured me.

      “The widows are going to wear well. Every day I like them better. Aunt Kate doesn’t believe in reading novels, but informs me that she does not propose to censor my reading-matter. Aunt Chatty loves novels. She has a ‘hidy-hole’ where she keeps them … she smuggles them in from the town library … together with a pack of cards for solitaire and anything else she doesn’t want Aunt Kate to see. It is in a chair seat which nobody but Aunt Chatty knows is more than a chair seat. She has shared the secret with me, because, I strongly suspect, she wants me to aid and abet her in the aforesaid smuggling. There shouldn’t really be any need for hidy-holes at Windy Poplars, for I never saw a house with so many mysterious cupboards. Though to be sure, Rebecca Dew won’t let them be mysterious. She is always cleaning them out ferociously. ‘A house can’t keep itself clean,’ she says sorrowfully when either of the widows protests. I am sure she would make short work of a novel or a pack of cards if she found them. They are both a horror to her orthodox soul. Rebecca Dew says cards are the devil’s books and novels even worse. The only things Rebecca ever reads, apart from her Bible, are the society columns of the Montreal Guardian. She loves to pore over the houses and furniture and doings of millionaires.

      “‘Just fancy soaking in a golden bathtub, Miss Shirley,’ she said wistfully.

      “But she’s really an old duck. She has produced from somewhere a comfortable old wing chair of faded brocade that just fits my kinks and says, ‘This is your chair. We’ll keep it for you.’ And she won’t let Dusty Miller sleep on it lest I get hairs on my school skirt and give the Pringles something to talk about.

      “The whole three are very much interested in my circlet of pearls … and what it signifies. Aunt Kate showed me her engagement ring (she can’t wear it because it has grown too small) set with turquoises. But poor Aunt Chatty owned to me with tears in her eyes that she had never had an engagement ring … her husband thought it ‘an unnecessary expenditure.’ She was in my room at the time, giving her face a bath in buttermilk. She does it every night to preserve her complexion, and has sworn me to secrecy because she doesn’t want Aunt Kate to know it.

      “‘She would think it ridiculous vanity in a woman of my age. And I am sure Rebecca Dew thinks that no Christian woman should try to be beautiful. I used to slip down to the

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